Steven Helmer Publications

I am in the middle of my second fundraising campaign this year. The first was for our annual ice show. Now, I am collecting donations for the Beaver Dam Family Center's annual fundraising banquet, held next weekend. This is the first year I've done anything like this and I've discovered I'm actually pretty good at it. However, as is the case with most new things, I also learned some important things along the way. First, you can't rely on mailers. I'm not saying sending out donation request letters to local businesses was a complete failure. I did manage to receive some donations. But, for this banquet, we sent out nearly 200 letters and only got about 15 donations back as a direct result of them. That's not a very good response. When I followed up with some of the businesses, I was told they didn't even look at the letters and threw them right in the recycle bin. As a result, I found follow-up is very important. In fact, when I do this again in a c...

I realized I forgot to talk about what I did yesterday afternoon. Our local ice rink (the one my daughter skates at) had their annual Skate with Santa and Christmas Skating Exhibition. This is their annual fundraising event for People Against a Violent Environment (our local battered woman shelter) and the cost of admission is a non-perishable food item. The event went very well. I volunteered at the admission table and we had a steady line of people coming in. In total, we had dozens of donated items as well as about $54 in cash, all raised in about two hours. A picture of the food donations is below:

I was a little concerned last night because there were other things going on in the area (including trick-or-treating in a near-by city). But, the turnout for open skate was decent. We had roughly 170 skaters show up and, at $5/each, it ended up being a nice fundraiser for the ice rink. It seems like everyone had a good time too. We only had three people ask for their money back because they couldn't find skates in their size (we always run out of certain sizes) but even they ended up sticking around to hang out with their friends. As far as my volunteering went, I bounced around a little bit. I didn't need to be the DJ last night (though, as it turns out, I probably would have been a pretty good one considering the kid that took those duties picked out virtually every song I would have). Instead, after helping with decorating, I ended up at the admission table before taking over in the skate rental room (a job I hate, but we were short-handed and one of the other volunteer...

Since she is now a teenager, I've been making my daughter take a little more responsibility when it comes to her skating. She already helps pay for her private lessons (she earns money helping her grandparents on her non-skate days) and, today, she's going to be helping out with the Halloween Open Skate. One of the projects I volunteered her for was making a donation bucket for the ice rink (my idea, it's going to go by the concession stand as a place for people to put their change). I figured she would just decorate the bucket with some bats, pumpkins, etc. I wasn't expecting her to do this. I think it'll be a big hit so we'll see if it succeeds in raising some additional money for the rink.