Mark Strat

Fundraising has always been a major source of income for many organisations such as community groups, sporting clubs, and the Parents and Friends (or Parents and Citizens) Associations of schools. With restricted only financial aid from governments, many of these establishments wouldn’t be financially viable without the good and tireless fundraising exploits of their members. For example sporting clubs charge membership fees but with outlays ever increasing, it would not be feasible for them to exist financially without fundraising.

The sorts of fundraising opportunities these days are many and varied. There’s a plethora of fundraising entities about trying to entice organisations to utilize their services. From selling bottled water, wrist bands, homewares, clothing, jewelry and show bags to equine riding, shopping tours and engraving bricks and pavers. The choices are truly amazing and seemingly endless.

Schools and sporting clubs have traditionally stuck by the period honoured techniques of fundraising by selling donuts, lollies, chocolates and biscuits. Over old few years, nonetheless, because of child obesity issues from poor eating habits and beneath working out, nearly all of these established fundraising products have started to fall out of favour with fundraising entities.

This has allowed the less traditional fundraising ideas to acquire a foot in the threshold so to speak of this multi-million dollar industry.

So where do you turn to when you wish to get started with fundraising? Say for instance your child is in their second year of school, and you have decided to grow more actively engaged in the comings and goings of their school. You attend the first P and C Association meeting of the year, and you find yourself on the Fundraising Committee for the year. You would like to impress your peers; you want to do something positive for the environment and do the job successfully.

There are many reasons why the school might need to fundraise. It might need funds for quite a few extra computers in the library, or new playground equipment or possibly they would love to see a roof over a fresh walkway. How you should behave, where to get started to raise the required funds? Today the majority of people are turning to the internet.

The internet has become the most popular and powerful tool for locating details, far more widely used now than the local newspapers or the yellow pages. When looking for ideas or information, the majority of people now do not think about any options apart from the internet. There are many search engines accessible to the internet user, such as Yahoo!, Bing, Altavista, Ask and Lycos. But by far the hottest search engine on the internet is Google.

ComScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing information and services to most of the internet’s largest businesses. According to estimates released by comScore at the end of 2008, Google ended the year with 63.5 percent market share of all search queries performed in the U.S that year! That is a huge slice of the pie.

Google provide a Keyword Tool, which allows access to facts regarding the most popular search phrases used by internet users when searching on Google. The hottest search terms used with Google for fundraising are in point of fact fundraising, fundraiser, school fundraising ideas, fundraiser ideas, ideas for fundraising, fundraisers and fundraising ideas.

The upshot from all of these searches show a wide variety of sites that the user can access, most of them being fundraising directories that list many hundreds of fundraising entities offering their services.

One of the best websites in these search results appears to be goldstar.net.au which is the web address for the Brisbane based company Gold Star Gifts and Stationery. This company supplies novelty stationery and gift items to schools, clubs and organisations Australia wide for fundraising purposes. They provide free delivery, no upfront costs, and the fundraising entity keeps 50% profit from the sales of their products. So if you’re looking for fundraising, fundraiser ideas or fundraisers, check out Goldstar today.