As everyone becomes increasingly aware of their ecological footprint, donors are more enthusiastic than ever about supporting environmentally friendly fundraisers and organizations. We’ve compiled a list of effective eco-friendly fundraising ideas to help you raise funds for your organization, while at the same time promoting the values of health, environmental awareness, community, and sustainability.
Global temperatures are climbing. Ice caps are melting, droughts, wildfires, and super hurricanes are tearing their way across the planet.
Wild forests are being destroyed, especially in the tropics, often to make way for cattle ranching, soybean or palm oil plantations, or other agricultural monocultures. We are degrading the soil through overgrazing, monoculture planting, erosion, soil compaction, overexposure to pollutants, and land-use conversion. The growing global population, combined with growing affluence, is putting ever greater pressure on essential natural resources, like water.
These are only some of the major and pressing threats to the Earth — and all of life on it, including human life.
With issues like these looming over us, it comes as no surprise that eco-friendly fundraisers are becoming increasingly popular.
And not just with non-profits and charities…
As donors become increasingly aware of their ecological footprint, they seek out and are more enthusiastic than ever about supporting environmentally friendly fundraisers and organizations.
In this article, we’ll share seven creative ways to raise more for your cause while doing good for the environment.
We’ve compiled a list of effective eco-friendly fundraising ideas to help you raise funds for your organization, while at the same time promoting the values of health, environmental awareness, community, and sustainability.
The fashion industry produces as much as 97 million tons of waste a year – and 18 million of those tons are textiles. As clothes decompose, they release landfill gas, a toxic brew of air pollutants that includes the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane. Plus, producing clothes takes up valuable resources like water and produces carbon emissions.
Instead of discarding surplus clothing and household textiles, this fundraiser gives them a second life. Hosting a clothing drive allows these items to be worn again, recycled, or repurposed for the good of your cause and our planet. You can turn your drive into a clothing swap where attendees can exchange items from their wardrobe and enjoy new clothing options.
Set up, promote, and manage your eco-friendly textile collection drive, making it as simple and fun as possible.
Make money for your organization by collecting donations during your event or even charging a small fee to participate. You’ll be helping the environment and helping your important cause at the same time!
Pro tip: Before you start, get in touch with a local homeless shelter, Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or someone who recycles and repurposes clothes. Donate any clothing that isn’t swapped to these organizations.
Many electronics are manufactured with harmful chemicals. If improperly disposed of, those chemicals can leach into the soil, polluting groundwater. Furthermore, many high-tech electronics rely on the mining of raw materials, including precious and semi-precious metals such as copper, lead, silicon, and aluminum. Each time someone improperly disposes of an electronic device, another opportunity is missed to reuse these valuable materials.
Recycling electronics is a straightforward fundraiser that will work particularly well for schools, colleges, and universities. It gives a second life to devices or their parts and keeps them from being improperly disposed of.
In many countries, old electronic devices can be exchanged for cash. Collect devices like:
And more. There are many ways in which these devices can be recycled; and a number of companies will want to buy them from you (to either repair, refurbish and sell on; or to reclaim parts for reuse).
Set up a collection point, perhaps at your school, where people can drop off their old electronics. Advertise your recycling drive, making sure to emphasize that the drive is for a good cause. Throughout the drive, keep people informed about the progress (e.g. 100 phones donated so far), and encourage further donations. This can also be a year-round fundraiser.
For example, Recycling Fundraiser and Funding Factory buy back electronics which include cell phones, iPhones, iPads, and other digital electronic devices.
One of the most dramatic impacts of deforestation is the loss of habitat for millions of species. Eighty percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and many cannot survive the deforestation that destroys their homes. In addition to the loss of habitat, the lack of trees also allows a greater amount of greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere. Further effects of deforestation include soil erosion because, with the clearance of tree cover, the soil is directly exposed to the sun, drying it out.
This is an eco-friendly fundraising event idea that everyone will want to be a part of! Commit to planting a certain number of trees if you reach your fundraising goal (for example, 10 trees planted for $1,000 raised).
When you reach your fundraising goal, get together with community members and plant the trees at a local park, forest, or nature preserve. Try to see if a local tree nursery will donate saplings to this event to increase your earnings even more.
Toxic materials or chemicals in litter can be blown or washed into rivers, forests, oceans, lakes, and creeks, and eventually pollute the waterways, land, forest areas, or aquatic environments. Plastic clogs waterways, leading to flooding in underdeveloped nations. It’s also killing birds and fish who consume it.
Use the warmer spring and summer days to clean up your local community for a healthier environment.
During a Clean Up Party, each volunteer gets garbage bags, a pair of gloves, and a shovel or garbage pick, and performs a walking clean-up of the designated area.
First, set a date and time for your clean-up event (ideally the weekend of Earth Day in April, but any day will do!). Get your volunteers to collect pledges from family members, friends, local businesses, and neighbors in your community. You can involve kids and other younger people in the community, and they might help you raise extra funds through friends and family.
The pledges can be a flat rate, or per bag, kilo, pound, or truckload of trash collected. They can also be per square meter or road mile cleaned.
Brand the event, blast music, and make it fun and upbeat. This will motivate more people to join in!
Or perhaps your goal is to raise funds to support a clean-up initiative, like L5P Alliance. They raised over $4,000 in 92 donations to support their initiative for a clean neighborhood.
Animal agriculture not only exploits billions of animals every year, but is also a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions, habitat loss, and major health problems such as heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. It takes an enormous amount of water to grow crops for animals to eat, clean factory farms, and give animals water to drink. Runoff from factory farms and livestock grazing is one of the leading causes of pollution in our rivers and lakes. More than 90 percent of all Amazon rainforest land cleared since 1970 is used for grazing livestock. While factory farms are ruining our land, commercial fishing methods such as bottom trawling and long-lining often clear the ocean floor of all life and destroy coral reefs.
Place volunteers with pledge sheets at various high-traffic areas in your community. Run a fundraiser and challenge your community to give up meat for a day (Meatless Monday) or for a week and raise funds for your cause.
Set up your fundraising page and ask the participants to donate what they would usually spend on meat that day or that week.
Alternatively, you could turn this into a peer-to-peer fundraiser – where each of your participants would launch their own small fundraising campaigns and pages, encouraging their friends and family to donate in the name of those completing the challenge.
Plastic bags start out as fossil fuels and end up as deadly waste in landfills and the ocean. Birds often mistake shredded plastic bags for food, filling their stomachs with toxic debris. Plastic bags are used for an average of 12 minutes. It takes 500 (or more) years for a plastic bag to degrade in a landfill. Unfortunately, the bags don’t break down completely but instead photo-degrade, becoming microplastics that absorb toxins and continue to pollute the environment. Even Arctic regions are polluted by plastic, as are oceans and the ocean bed.
Instead of selling candy, balloons, or trinkets, offer eco-friendly products such as eco-friendly cleaning supplies, reusable grocery bags, biodegradable trash bags, organic food items, and soy candles. Not only are they healthier for humans and the planet, but they either last longer, serve a purpose, or are something your supporters will use every day.
For example, Equal Exchange’s Catalog Fundraiser offers a variety of USDA-approved organic and Fair Trade chocolate, coffee, tea, cocoas, olive oil, and more at a 40% profit.
One of the best products to sell if you want to fundraise in an environmentally responsible way is to sell reusable shopping bags. Encouraging more people to use reusable shopping bags is a great way to both raise money and help the environment.
There are several companies that offer eco-bags for fundraisers. Jutebags has natural ‘bags for life’ that can be sold for fundraising. Ecosilk bags also have beautiful, durable bags that come in a range of vibrant colors.
Regardless of their surge in popularity in recent years, we’re still far from Earth-friendly and sustainable practices becoming the norm. Only 20 years ago, the majority of people were unaware of how their choices impacted the environment. Many people still don’t have practical tips and ideas to change up their lifestyle to be better for the environment. On the other hand, some find the amount of information and tips out there too overwhelming and don’t know how to get started.
Challenge your community to a green fast, asking them to adopt more environmentally friendly practices for a single week. Pick only one or a couple of these to make the challenge less overwhelming for the participants. For example:
For best results, turn this into a peer-to-peer fundraiser. Encourage the challenge participants to reach out to friends, family, and acquaintances to solicit donations.
Like with the clothing/textile drive, ask your community members to clean out their bookshelves and donate the books they don’t want to keep or read again. Then, organize a used book fair and sell the books.
Eco-products are all the rage now, and new eco-friendly and eco-first companies are popping up every day. Hold an eco-friendly market and invite those companies to join in and run a stall at the market for a set fee. You can also charge a small entry fee to customers to raise additional funds. It’s a win-win. The companies get to sell to more customers and raise their brand awareness, and you get to raise funds for a green cause.
Sell seeds or growing kits for flowers, plants, herbs, and vegetables. This fundraiser is particularly great for schools. Earth will only benefit from more people learning more about the complex process of growing plants and food. There are plenty of companies out there that offer a whole range of healthy, fun, and educational products for you to choose from, which can be sold through a take-home drive, stall or event, or even a simple order form.
To encourage reusing and repurposing, organize a fun day of workshops where participants are taught how to mend or repurpose clothes, furniture pieces, toys, and more. Get all the supplies donated (or collect them), and inspire an eco-friendly and sustainable spirit.
You could even have zero-waste or low-impact bloggers come in and teach participants how to make their own toothpaste, tomato sauce, or detergent.
Sell tickets for this event, the way Community Cat Angels did for their “Painting For A Purpose” Fundraiser. They used Donorbox Events to easily share all event information, collect payment, and set a ticket sales deadline to manage their attendance.
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Nature’s Classroom is an immersive and fun outdoor education program that aims to inspire participants to get to know and love the natural world. This fundraiser is particularly effective with children.
Organize team-based classes, games, quests, and challenges for participants to learn more about the great outdoors. Getting to know nature is the first step to respecting it and protecting it.
It doesn’t take a lot to promote sustainability in lasting and valuable ways. Simply looking around your own school, organization, or community and initiating small improvements is one of the easiest ways to support a cleaner and healthier planet for all.
The detrimental impact that human activities have on the environment is undeniable. Studies are being conducted each year demonstrating the extent of the issue. Climate change and other major environmental issues will result in catastrophic consequences in our future (and some of them are already visible).
More needs to be done to remedy the major environmental issues that affect us today. The good news is that by making changes, we can have a direct and positive impact on the environment.
Going green with earth-friendly products, recyclable materials, reusable containers, and more is the way to go. So why not also run a green fundraiser the next time you decide to have one? Raise funds, promote environmental awareness, and help the Earth – all at the same time!
At Donorbox, we strive to make your nonprofit experience as productive as possible, whether through our online donation system or through resources on our Nonprofit Blog.
Ilma Ibrisevic is a content creator and nonprofit writer. She’s passionate about meaningful work, sustainability, and social movements. If she’s not working, she’s obsessing over coffee or cooking. You can connect with her on Linkedin.
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