Holding a successful fundraising event for your charity marathon

Lesley and l have been Walking the Walk for 7 years now. After 4 years of asking our friends & family to sponsor us, we had the idea in 2017, our 5th year, that we would hold a fundraising event.

Question was, what would we do? And would anyone actually come?

Lesley enjoys bingo with her family, so we thought we would try get 20-30 people together and have a few games of bingo with drinks and nibbles. To our amazement we sold 100 tickets and raised £2,446! Then in 2018 we raised £3,122!

So here we are in 2019 and our yearly event has been a sell-out once again, still playing Bingo! This year we have raised an amazing £4,046!

Where do you even start organising an event?

Decide on a date near the MoonWalk, making sure it’s not school holidays or a bank holiday weekend. After the MoonWalk works as well as before. This year we had a ‘Prosecco & Puddings Bingo evening’ a month after the MoonWalk.

Book the venue; we soon learnt to find a venue with a drinks licence and a microphone! Always ASK for a good price as it’s for charity, we get our venue for half price! We priced the tickets at £12 which included a free glass of Prosecco, AND asked people to bring puddings to share, we provided snacks. Our local wine store deliver to the venue, glasses too, and will do sale or return.

We composed a letter asking local businesses for raffle prizes, we found ASKING them face to face was much better than posting a letter through their letter box at night and keeping your fingers crossed that they would contact you! Walk the Walk can supply a letter confirming you are taking part in the MoonWalk too. You can combine donations together to make fabulous prizes.

Find a confident, willing bingo caller! Bingo books were £5 for 5 games and pink dabbers at £1 (what the players mark the numbers off with). We sell raffle tickets at £1 each or £5 for 5 tickets, and we promote all the great prizes on our Facebook event page a few weeks before.

To promote it, Facebook is a wonderful thing! You can easily create an event page, always post around 7-8pm on a Friday or Saturday evening when most people are looking at their phones.

The night it is very exciting...

... the room holds 120 people, we ASK for lots of helpers who wear the famous pink bra T-shirts. We have 3 games of Bingo in the first half with a £10 prize for each ‘House.’ In the break, we talk briefly about our MoonWalk evening and what Nina says, how much money is raised, and what it is used for. There’s lots of information on the Walk the Walk website.

Then we tuck into the most delicious puddings and continue with the other 2 bingo games.
We have the most fabulous evening, lots of laughter and fun in the room. The same people come back each year, and on the way out they say, “See you next year?”

And they will!

Don't know where to start?

If you need any fundraising ideas or help with your fundraising plans, just get in touch with our fabulous fundraising team... we are happy to help.