The MitoCanada Colour WalkRun

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1. Engage your friends and colleagues. List all your friends who are interested in MitoCanada. Decide how much you want to ask each one for. If you are not sure of an amount, use a range. Email them/post on your facebook or twitter pages. Phone those who don’t respond in two weeks. Some of us will need 10 friends to give $100, and some will need 50 friends to give $20. Most of us will need a combination of gifts of $100, $50 and $25.

2. Give part of the $1000. Then ask your friends to join you in giving $50, $100, or whatever amount you gave. This is most effective because you are not asking them to do anything you haven’t done.

3. Set up a challenge campaign. Challenge gifts can be quite small. Tell people you’ll give $5 for every $25 they give, or will match every $50 gift up to ten gifts.

4. Hold a garage sale – most people have at least a $1000 in quality items that they want/need to get rid of.

5. Pledge monthly. Pledge $28 per month, and get two others to do likewise.

6. Plan a spaghetti dinner at a church or community hall or other big room with a large kitchen with four or five friends. Charge $10 per person and feed more than 100 people. You can charge extra for wine or dessert.

7. Have a fancy dinner at your home or a regular dinner at someone’s fancy home. Serve unusual or gourmet food, or have special entertainment. Charge $40 or more per person, and have 25 or more guests.

8. Get three friends to help you have a progressive dinner. Start at one person’s home for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, progress to the next person’s house for soup or salad, the next for the main course, and the last person’s for dessert. Either charge by the course or for the whole package. To make it extra special, albeit costly, get a limousine for the evening that carries guests from house to house, or have live music at each site.

9. Host a house party. Do not charge admission and invite as many people as you can. During the party, give a short talk about MitoCanada and ask everyone to consider a gift of $25, $50, $100 or more (depending on the crowd). Either pass out envelopes and ask people to give then, or after the party contact everyone individually who came and ask for a major gift. Indicate that you have given and, if appropriate, how much you have given.

10. Get your gambling friends together. Charge a $5 entrance fee and have a poker evening, asking that every “pot” be split with the organization. Individuals win and so does the organization. You can charge extra for refreshments, or include one or two glasses of something with the price of admission. (Watch the laws in your community on this one. In some communities it is illegal to gamble, even in your own home.)

11. Do one fundraising event every other month. This might look like: Poker Party $200, Fancy dinner (8 people x $50) $400, Sell 50 raffle tickets @$2 $100, Book sale $200, Recycle newspapers $100.

12. Solicit small businesses, churches, or service clubs for $1000. If you are active in a church or you own your own business and are involved in business organizations or service clubs, this can be very effective. You can often raise $200-$1000 with a simple proposal and oral presentation.

13. Ask ten people to save all their change for the next month and save yours as well. Count the funds at the end and use one of the other methods to raise the rest. (You may not need to.)

14. Ask two to five friends to help you put on a bake sale or book sale. You and your friends bake the goodies or get the books, staff it and clean up afterwards. This is an excellent way to get people involved in fundraising without ever actually asking them for money.

15. Lead or get someone to lead a nature walk, an architectural tour, a historic tour, a sailing trip, a rafting trip, or a horseback ride. Charge $15-$25 per person, or charge $35 and provide lunch. Advertise the event in the newspaper to draw in people from outside your network.

16. Start a pyramid dinner, or a chain dinner. Invite 12 people and charge $12 each. Get two people of the twelve you invited to invite 12 people each at $12, and two people from each of those two dinners to have 12 people at $12, and so on. Here’s the income: Your dinner $12 x 12 $144 From your dinner $12 x (12 + 12) $288 From those dinners $12 x (12 + 12 + 12 + 12) $576 From those dinners $12 x (12 x 8) etc.

17. Sell your frequent flyer miles to friends or donate them to MitoCanada for a raffle. Watch the rules of the airline on this, but some airlines let you give away miles, and you may be able to sell your miles as long as you don’t go through a mileage broker.

18. If you live in a nice house or own a getaway cottage in a beautiful place or an exquisite city, rent it out for a week or a weekend two or three times during the year and give the proceeds to MitoCanada.

19. Offer to do something your friends and family have been nagging you to do anyway and attach a price to it. For example, quit smoking on the condition that your friends donate to MitoCanada, or get your friends to pay a certain amount for every day you don’t smoke for up to 30 days. Agree to match their gifts at the end of thirty days if you didn’t smoke and to give them their money back if you did. (This method could be applied to other healthy behaviors, such as exercising or not eating sugar.)

20. If you or someone you know owns a small business that has regular customers who receive a catalog or announcements of sales, write them an appeal letter for MitoCanada. Your letter can say something like, “You are one of my best customers. As such, I let you know about sales coming up and good things happening in my store. Today, I want to tell you about another good thing—what I do when I am not minding the store.” Then go on to describe the group and ask for a donation.

21. Similar to #21, post this letter on your Web site. Link to the organization’s Web site and ask people to donate.

22. Give it yourself.

23. Strategy with a long-deferred payoff (we hope): leave a bequest.

24. With similar hopes as above, get friends to include the group in their wills.

25. Ask friends who belong to service clubs, sororities, antique collecting groups, support groups, bridge clubs, etc. to discuss MitoCanada in their group and pass the hat for donations. A once-a-year sweep of even small groups can yield $100 from each.

26. For the church-going: ask if MitoCanada can be a “second collection.” The church passes the plate for its own collection and then you give a brief talk about MitoCanada and the plate is passed again; the proceeds go to MitoCanada.

27. A variation on the above is to organize a “second collection Sunday” and get as many churches as you can to take up a second collection for MitoCanada on the same Sunday.

28. If, as a child, you collected something avidly that you now store in a basement, consider selling it. Coins and stamps are particularly valuable and have usually increased in value over the years. But your collection of rocks, toy ships or rockets, arrowheads, or dolls can also be valuable.

29. Have a sidewalk sale or garage sale for your whole neighborhood or building. Go around to your neighbors and tell them you will take their stuff outside and sit with it all day to sell it if they will donate half or all of the proceeds to MitoCanada. Since these are items that people want to be rid of anyway, it is a good deal for them.

30. An idea for people who live in border towns: Get permission to place a large container in stores or even at the airports of towns near national borders. Have a sign that asks people (in several languages) to throw in any coins or paper money they have not exchanged. Many times people leaving Canada don’t have time to exchange all their money or cannot exchange their loose change. Multiply this times hundreds of shoppers or travelers and you can make a lot of money.

31. Find out which of your friends (perhaps this is true for you also) work in corporations with matching gift programs. Then ask them to donate and have their gift matched for MitoCanada. Ask them to ask their co-workers to donate and get their gifts matched as well.

32. Give it yourself. It is the easiest way for those who are able. (This is so good we have to say it twice.)

Interested in sponsorship opportunities, please contact Caroline Mills at caroline.mills@mitocanada.org