Retail Fundraising - Stores Helping Non Profits

Retail store fundraisers come in a few different types.

Type 1 is the community day.  During a community day, your organization sells coupons, which are given to you by the retail store.  The community then redeems those coupons on a particular day.  The non profit organization keeps all the money they collect.

Type 2 is a percentage of sales fundraising event.  In this type of fundraiser, the store gives the community a percentage of the sales for a particular day or a particular time slot.  Typically, the group doing the fundraising is passing out flyers that are redeemed at the store.

Type 3 is script fundraising.  Script fundraisers allows non profit organizations to sell gift cards to many types of stores.  The non profit buys the gift cards at a discount, typically 3% to 10%, and they get to keep the profits by selling the gift card at full price.

This article is going to focus on the Type 1 and Type 2 fundraisers as there are many script companies that are easy to find by searching your favorite search engine.

There are also many other types of fundraisers that you can read about in this article about <a href="http://www.squidoo.com/fundraising-1">scout and church fundraisers</a>.

The retail store Carson Pirie Scott hosts a community day fundraising event twice per year, typically in the spring and in the fall.  This event requires participating groups to sell a $10 coupon for $5.  The receiver of the coupon also receives a 20% coupon and a 30% early bird coupon.

This type of program I really like.  The Food Lion MVP Program allows you to register your MVP card and tie it to a local organization.  Food Lion will then donate a portion of every purchase you make to your local charity organization.

Be careful of organizations that make you use their credit card for this type of fundraiser.

Gordon Food Service, commonly abbreviate GFS, has a Fun Funds program that allows local charities and not for profits to earn rewards on 1,000's of items within a GFS Marketplace store.  Through this program an organization can earn up to 10% depending on their monthly purchase level.