CAFECOSA Coffee Fundraiser

Fundraising can be a difficult proposition for any organization. Having good products or interesting events that can attract customers is a good start, but motivating people to join a team to do the fundraising is more important.

One important aspect of motivating a team is communicating what it is they are working for - what is the team trying to achieve. Impressing upon the team that they are working toward a goal that is worth their efforts is critical to success.
With that said, it is interesting when we have spoken with clients of ours who use fundraisers to do general fundraising and have had only marginal success vs when they are fundraising for a particular project.

While a school might require fundraising for general operations, and the benefits of having the school are clear, this doesn’t necessarily come across to members of the organization. General operations aren’t very sexy. They are, in many cases, incredibly necessary. While all volunteer efforts to generate funds for general operations should be viewed as noble community-building efforts by the members of your group the goal can be unwieldy. Members might feel that dues should pay for general operations, that volunteer work for this goal is unsustainable, and also feel frustrated by the never-ending need to raise funds.

Projects, on the other hand, are finite.  With goals that are easily explained and which people can get excited about, it provides people with a motivator for an effort in which they can anticipate and end and an obvious benefit - like a ski trip, or a new piece of equipment, repairs to a specific asset, or the creation of a specific program.
It might help organizations that are raising funds for general operations to turn the effort into a quantifiable goal.  “We need to keep Martha on Staff - Raise funds to save Martha!”  Perhaps this is a little dire, but you get the idea.

If your organization has experience with fundraising for general operations with success, please let us know in the comments.

Good Luck with your Efforts!

You probably know that CAFECOSA offers gourmet Tarrazu coffee, one of the finest coffees in the world, as the cornerstone of our fundraiser offering. What you may not know is that we also offer other products. One of which is Coffee Flower Honey.

What is that?

Well, Coffee Flower Honey is the honey that comes from bees that create their honey from the pollen of flowering coffee plants. The coffee doesn’t taste like coffee, but it does have a distinctive taste that is absolutely delicious. And it is a great complement to gourmet Tarrazu coffee as a fundraiser item. People can spread it on toast or even use it to sweeten their coffee. Whichever your customers choose it is definitely something new and different that they will appreciate.