Springtime can be a successful fundraising season if you’re willing to think outside the box. Donors have spent winter cooped up in their homes, and any excuse to get out will be appealing. Here's a list of several spring fundraising ideas, including events, that can help you get started on planning your next fundraiser.
Leaves are turning green, flowers are blossoming, and people are waking up from their wintertime hibernation.
Although winter holidays are usually the most important time of the year for nonprofit fundraising, springtime fundraising potential should not be underestimated.
As the days get longer and sunnier, everyone’s mood lifts – and this is exactly why you should be fundraising in spring. A better mood generally means more giving.
Easter is a major holiday for many people across the world. There are plenty of Easter fundraisers to choose from Easter concerts, Easter baskets, Easter Egg Toss, breakfast with the Easter Bunny, etc. However, Easter Egg Hunt is the most well-known part of Easter fun.
To organize a good Easter Egg Hunt you need a large venue. Easter Egg Hunts usually happen outdoors. School grounds or a local park are good options. Make sure the area is safe for children and can be easily supervised.
Purchase some small, good-quality, artificial Easter eggs and hide them all. Look for Easter deals in major shops and perhaps even try to get the eggs donated by explaining your good cause.
Invite families and kids to take part and ensure you have a contingency plan in case it rains. Charge a small fee for children to take part (a fee per child of around $3-$5 is reasonable). You may also consider including gift vouchers or movie tickets to provide extra incentives.
To get the most out of this activity, look at incorporating other fundraising ideas into the hunt, such as raffles and refreshments, photo opportunities with the Easter Bunny, and Easter games.
Lastly, create a fundraising page to accept donations with your easter egg hunt. If you’d rather turn it into a full-day event with other activities, set up an event page online and sell tickets in advance to meet your fundraising goals. With Donorbox, you can do both – create and customize a donation form to accept donations and use Donorbox Events to sell tickets to your attendees!
Pro tip: Make sure to check the list of official public holidays in your country, as Easter falls differently each year. Don’t set the date of your Easter fundraiser to coincide exactly with Easter. Those dates are traditionally set aside for family celebrations, religious observation or holidays. Consider organizing your fundraiser the weekend before.
Easter Egg decorating is one of the most fun Easter activities, almost as fun as the Easter Egg Hunt and biting into chocolate bunnies!
To organize an Easter Egg Decorating party, send out the invites, and promote the event well in advance. This will give parents enough time to plan around their holiday schedules. When promoting the event, make sure to include helpful details. For example, suggest to parents that they dress their kids in clothes they won’t mind getting a little messy.
Choose a sunny patch of grass, ideally a public garden, and set out tables for decorating. Ensure the children have enough space to sit down comfortably and get creative.
Purchase Easter Egg Decorating supplies, or have them donated by a local store, and place them outside together with hard-boiled uncolored eggs. Your supplies should include dyes, crayons (for younger children), egg dippers, stickers, and egg nests.
Charge participation fees. Sell tickets in advance and share your online event page across various channels like email, social media, etc. to create momentum for the event.
You could make the Easter Egg Decorating event open to adults as well, not only children. If your eggs turn out very impressive, you can display them, for instance at an Easter party or at the end of your decorating event, and have people purchase them. You can also set out jars in front of the eggs, and people can vote for their favorites with their spare change.
Organize a springtime 5k race. Start by choosing the location/route and obtaining all the necessary permits. You should organize the race in a location where a lot of your audience/runners live. If possible, also consider the scenery. If you want to draw in more participants, consider a flat terrain with gentle downhill slopes.
The next step is to promote the race. Put up posters or flyers at all the running stores within the radius that you believe most runners will be willing to travel. Another great way to promote is to advertise at other races. If you’re targeting a wider audience, consider running a social media campaign and advertising at colleges and universities, clubs, associations, and faith organizations.
Set up aid and hydration stations, as well as portable restrooms. Recruit volunteers, and don’t forget about the finisher medals and race t-shirts!
In order to fundraise, nonprofits typically charge a registration fee. Often, the fee will be the lowest for those who register in advance and it will increase the week or day of the event. This is probably the simplest and most straightforward fundraising model for a run event. See what Jones Gardens is doing with their Springtime 5K – they’re in the process of selling their early bird tickets with this Donorbox-hosted fundraising page!
Create Spring Fundraising Campaign!
Join Jones Gardens and 80,000+ other organizations in leveraging Donorbox’s powerful features to boost donations with a faster checkout and great giving experience! To sell tickets, we suggest that you try Donorbox Events – that streamlines the whole ticket-selling process for your nonprofit. Add unlimited ticket tiers, set purchasing deadline, add ticket quantity, accept Apple Pay payments, get donations in addition to ticket sales, and more. Learn more about Donorbox Events.
Flower arrangement is no longer a thing of the past! The new generation has a keen interest in everything ‘DIY’ and ‘crafts’, whether it’s making your own beer or growing your own food.
Organize a flower arranging workshop teaching participants how to create a hand-held bouquet. Participants can learn how to create bouquets ready to be gifted or taken home and placed directly in a vase.
A floral workshop is typically 2 hours, and participants will learn the basics of floral design and techniques on how to choose, condition, and arrange flowers, followed by a hands-on session to creating hand-tied bouquets or other floral arrangements.
Charge a participation fee that covers – the flowers, wrapping, tool usage, instruction, delectable treats, complimentary refreshment, and the donation to your fundraiser.
To add a fun twist to this springtime fundraising idea, you can also turn it into a flower crown party. Participants can make their own flower crowns and then wear them to the party.
This spring fundraising idea is amongst the most Earth-friendly fundraisers out there and it’s a great alternative to trinkets, gift items, wrapping paper, or candle fundraisers.
A number of companies offer direct home delivery to your customers, free supplies, a 100% guaranteed product, and a 50% profit for your non-profit. These companies also provide promotional materials, bulb catalogs, and order forms.
Focus on assembling and training a sales team. If you don’t have a sales team readily available, you will need to find some volunteers! Once you have a sales team, the basic running of a flower bulb fundraiser is quite simple.
By using bulb catalogs your team takes orders from family, friends, and acquaintances, etc. Consider offering incentives to your top sellers. Once you have all the orders in, send them off, alongside the money owed (sales minus your percentage), to the company you’re working with.
The flower bulbs will then be delivered to you and you will, in turn, have to distribute them through your sales team to all the buyers.
There are many benefits to gardening. Individuals and communities are the strongest when they have the knowledge and skills to provide food for themselves and their communities. The desire for healthy, local, and organic food is growing.
Learning and applying gardening skills also adds financial benefits to individuals and communities. Finally, many individuals seek to find new ways to respect the environment, engage in leisure activities, and improve the quality of life for everyone.
Furthermore, many of us take up gardening as a hobby during spring. Therefore, a gardening class is the ideal spring fundraising idea.
Choose the right space for your gardening class. Ideally, pick a garden center or a local community garden. Choose a weekend day so that more people can participate, and make the class 2-3 hours long to cover the very basics of gardening.
Charge a fee ($30-$50 is reasonable), and make sure the cost of all the seeds, soil, and tools is covered.
This year, Earth Day falls on April 22. More than 140 countries around the world celebrate Earth Day and make efforts to clean up the planet for a cleaner and healthier environment.
With this comes many environmental campaigns, which makes springtime perfect for green fundraisers.
There are many ways to honor Earth Day (ditching disposable plastics, seed sale, turning off your lights), but a clean-up is the ideal spring fundraising idea for a large group. Each volunteer gets a roll of garbage bags, a pair of gloves, and a shovel or garbage pick, and performs a walking clean-up of the designated area.
Firstly, set a date and time for your clean-up event (ideally the weekend of Earth Day). Get your volunteers to collect pledges from family members, friends, local businesses, and neighbors in your community. Choose a location. Good choices for clean-up areas are parks, riverbanks, and streams, schools, ditches, vacant lots, etc.
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. You can also make this into a competitive fundraiser where neighboring communities, schools, or teams see who can collect the most trash in one day.
Mother’s Day in the United States is annually held on the second Sunday of May. In France, it’s on May 27th.
To celebrate all mothers, host a Mother’s Day Breakfast Fundraiser. Hosting a breakfast fundraiser is a great way to honor mothers around the world.
Partner with a local restaurant and host a fancy breakfast so that mothers won’t have to lift a finger.
Of course, the menu is one of the most important things to consider during the planning of a breakfast fundraiser. While pancake breakfast fundraisers are a popular school and church fundraising ideas, you are not limited to that alone, especially if you partner with a restaurant. Offering more gourmet and brunch-like options will allow you to charge more for admission and draw a larger audience.
When you’ve decided on a location and a menu, it’s time to promote the event. Create a press release, distribute event flyers, invite media to attend, and create a social media campaign.
Furthermore, a good breakfast fundraiser needs a crew of dedicated volunteers ready to help out. Integrate fun but tasteful games and activities to keep everyone engaged. Choose whether to invite-only mothers or mothers and their families – depending on the goal and the feel of your fundraiser.
Bonus: Here are some amazing mother’s day fundraiser ideas we’ve curated for you to try out.
Spring is also the time when people are turning a new page and starting over, many by clearing out their homes and garages.
A lot of decluttering will be going on, with residents throwing out unwanted books, decor, and clothes. There are a lot of ways to go about organizing this activity, whether it’s by focusing on a specific category (e.g. clothes) or by picking up any item they wish to donate.
The best way to run this kind of fundraising event is to offer pick-up for items that your supporters are getting rid of and charge them a fee for it.
Create a registration form and promote the service. Once you have enough sign-ups, organize them by location and give each of your volunteers a list of homes to get to.
This fundraising event works best for organizations like homeless shelters or a community organization that gives to families in need.
Community gardens are fantastic resources, especially during spring. They provide green spaces in urban environments, give gardeners without land of their own a place to work, and foster a real sense of community.
To organize the picnic, coordinate enough picnic tables and/or folding tables and chairs for your expected attendees, plus a few extras. Make sure wheelchair-using or other limited-mobility guests can seat themselves comfortably.
Your picnic menu should include several main and a couple of side dishes. Make sure to keep in the loop all dietary preferences and allergens. If possible, get the bulk of the food donated from local stores and restaurants.
In this case, you can either charge an entry fee for your fundraiser, or you can charge for food items while the fundraiser is going on. Make sure you have enough volunteers to serve and prepare food, as well as sell tickets and organize entertainment.
If you’re nervous about preparing food for everyone, you can ask participants to bring their own food and have them purchase a “spot” at your community garden picnic. You can provide refreshments and games.
As the weather begins to get warmer, there are ample opportunities to get everyone to join one of your spring fundraisers. Spring is also THE time to get outside and moving, which is why most of our suggested fundraisers happen outdoors.
Seasonal fundraisers are a great way to add some novelty and excitement to your yearly fundraising strategy and are a foolproof way to test which ideas work for your nonprofit and which ones don’t. And as you do that, remember to try Donorbox’s simple, donor-friendly, and highly efficient fundraising tools that will help you raise more money and boost outreach!
Our fundraising products and features range from customized and accessible Donation Forms, Fundraising Pages, Crowdfunding, Events, Memberships, Peer-to-Peer, Text-to-Give, Donor Management, and more. Donorbox also integrates with a number of leading CRM platforms and 2000+ other tools to help make the most of your donor data and enhance your marketing efforts. Learn more on the website and sign up today to start fundraising like a pro!
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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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Ilma Ibrisevic