Our venture into event fundraising began while working with the Peace River Record Gazette with the Greased Pig Races in the early 80s. Memories of the event are a bit hazy but it was held on main street.
Since then, I’ve been involved in various fundraising initiatives, from assisting the local hockey team to raise a few hundred dollars for tournaments, to work on the drive for the purchase of a CAT scan machine.
At one point it was pretty easy, groups could just approach the local town council and major businesses and they would get money.
But times have changed, money is much tighter, and unless you are a major player like a hospital foundation, finding sponsors and donations has become much harder.
With the economic downturn in 2008 I saw a major change with donations drying up. The major groups could still get money, not as much as they were used to, but some. That left little to nothing for the groups that did not have a major public face walking away with nothing.
That is when as the owner of the local newspaper I started to work on creating projects that would find money for those small groups, at the same time using our design, sales and advertising experience to make sure that an organization could walk away with the maximum amount of money from their efforts.
For example in 2009, as the owner of the local newspaper, we took our commitment a step further. During that year, we conceptualized a calendar project that enabled a local group to raise an impressive sum of over $60,000, and remarkably, with absolutely no cost incurred by the group.
This initiative exemplified our dedication to devising innovative solutions.
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