Every year, offices and businesses around the world build team spirit and enhance community involvement by doing company-wide fundraisers for various charities. We think this is wonderful, and we thought we would write a friendly guide that we thought would be helpful. So here goes!
Choosing a charity
- If you make the choice of which charity to support part of your office activities, people will be more engaged in the process. There are several companies in Ottawa that ask employees to make presentations to the rest of the staff for charities they support. Others do this via email before having a staff vote.
- Research the charity. If your staff knows where their donation will go, and what it will accomplish, they will be more likely to participate than if they have only a vague idea about the non-profit that will benefit from their fundraising efforts.
- Try to avoid soliciting in-kind donations that need to be purchased. If, for example, you are supporting a food bank, understand that the food bank can do more with $5 than they can with five cans. If your staff goes out and all spends $5 on cans, their donation will be less efficient than simply directing that $5 directly to the charity.
- Get that charity to provide you with a ‘wish list’. Every charity has something they desperately need, and a monetary amount they require to reach that goal. Look over those goals, then decide what your fundraising goal will be. Put up a graphic of some kind in your office to track your progress and encourage participation.
- If possible, close out your fundraising efforts by bringing your whole team out for a morning or afternoon to visit the charity for whom they have been raising funds. Not only does everyone get to see what they’ve been working for, but they can get into a group photo when you make the cheque presentation, and tag themselves in the social media posts that follow.
- Find out if there are other ways to help the charity, through events you are already planning to hold (ie: Christmas party, Grey Cup viewing party). Below in this post, we include the ways you can help Operation Come Home simply by having a party!
Some fundraising ideas:
Escape room: This idea came from Hydro Ottawa, where their youth committee created an ‘escape room’ in one of their empty offices. Other employees paid a small fee to form a team to try to escape from the room, and the team that did it fastest won a prize. The teams ended up being groups from various departments within the building, competing against each other for bragging rights. (Hydro Ottawa’s was quite good – only 60% of teams who competed made it out!)
Beer/wine survivor: This was done at Rogers Media for several years, where they ran both programs. Here is how they set it up: Every person who wants to participate brings $10 and a bottle of wine for Wine Survivor (or a six-pack of beer for Beer Survivor). For a $20 donation, the donor receives three lives instead of just one, with no additional obligation to bring in more wine or beer. Every day at lunch time, five names are drawn out of a bucket, and those names are eliminated from the list. At their big party near the end of the event, the final names are drawn and the last person remaining wins all the wine or beer.
Air band / karaoke competition: This was a fundraiser that worked very well for Innovapost. Groups of employees formed air band teams and paid an entry fee. The company brought in a “celebrity judge” to judge the performers (the way they did it, the guest judge was as mean as possible) and the winners got their name on a plaque that went up in the lunch room year after year.
Sports sweepstakes 50/50: For several years, Consumers Distributing ran this year-long program. Every major sporting event (NFL/NBA/NHL/MLB/CFL playoffs, golf and tennis majors, Indy and Daytona 500, fight cards) they would have a 50/50 contest. Employees would pay a small fee ($5 or $10 each time) and make predictions – the winner would receive 50% of the pot, and the charity would receive the other half.
Survivor / Big Brother / Dancing With The Stars 50/50 pool: Whatever reality competition show your office watches, turn it into a pool! We do this here at OCH with Survivor, but there are many other shows where it can work! We each donate $20 at the beginning of the season, and pick the winner – then at the end of the season anyone who picked the eventual winner gets half the pool money! If more than one person picks the winner, they split the pool money – and if no one picks correctly, the charity gets ALL the pool money!
Other ideas:
Office bake-off
Chili cookoff
Foreign currency exchange – got any cash lying around from a recent trip to a foreign country? Bring it in and designate one person to exchange it for dollars and cents for a donation.
Swear jar / buzzword jar – what annoys your team more? Cursing or phrases like “think outside the box”?
Brown bag day – get your employees to bring a bagged lunch one day, and eat together – then donate what they would have spent eating out to the fund.
Ask your HR department if your company has a “matched giving” policy, to double your donation!
How your office party itself can help (OCH-specific)
- Hire FoodWorks to cater that party for you! Our youth will cook your whole staff a delicious meal, and the cost of that meal can go on your big board as a contribution toward OCH! You can book FoodWorks catering by clicking on this link here.
- Get BYBO to deliver delicious Beau’s beer for your party! Our youth deliver Beau’s in the Ottawa area for anyone who orders online at www.bybo.ca. We get an $8 delivery fee from you, and a $7 bonus from Beau’s. Add $15 to that board!
- Commission BottleWorks to clean up after the party is over! BottleWorks will come by and collect every beer, wine, or liquor bottle. They will then issue you a tax receipt, and you can add that total to the amount you’ve raised this year! To book BottleWorks, email Samantha at bottleworks@operationcomehome.ca
Help through your office Secret Santa initiative (OCH-specific, again)
Are you doing a secret-Santa-type game in your office? Some possible gifts to consider:
FoodWorks offers gift cards!
Our catering social enterprise delivers locally-sourced home-cooked food to your home three times a week with your subscription to the service. The meals are prepared by our youth under the supervision of a chef. They learn valuable kitchen skills and earn some money while gaining work experience in our kitchen!
- Gift cards come in denominations of $25
- They can be purchased online here: https://www.foodworksottawa.ca/order-your-meals/gift-card
Make a donation to OCH on someone’s behalf!
It is possible to donate money to Operation Come Home in someone else’s name, so long as you have their address and information so that we can provide them with a tax receipt! Go to CanadaHelps and choose Operation Come Home. Choose ‘Donate Now’. Where it says ‘dedicate this donation’, click ‘in honour of’. Proceed with the donation!
Shopping online for gifts?
If you go to our iGive page before doing your online shopping, the retailer will make a donation to us, without you having to do anything more! Go to www.igive.com, and when prompted type in ‘Operation Come Home’. Install the widget and/or app. Now, every time you shop online at participating retailers, we will receive a donation from the retailer at no extra cost to you.
Where your donations go
This is the kind of thing you should ask your charity to provide. This way, you can decide on a fundraising goal, and know just how that goal will help the charity you have chosen. Here are some of the goals and fundraising numbers on our wish list:
A donation of $200 will buy us huge, high-quality stickers for our BottleWorks program. People who sign up to have BottleWorks pick up bottles from their houses will get those stickers put onto their blue bins. This way, no one will pick through those bins looking for bottles because they know it is a BottleWorks house, our truck can identify the driveway easily, and BottleWorks will get some street advertising once every two weeks!
A donation of $500 funds our drop-in for two full days. In those two days a drop-in staff member will engage with approximately 75 youth. Of those 75 youth, many will go on to seek help from our mental health specialist and addiction counselor. Others will sign up for our school or an employment program. And still others will join us in one of our social enterprises.
A donation of $1,750 funds the ideal essentials for one youth to move into one home. Furniture, appliances, cooking essentials, towels, pillows, cleaning supplies and more. Things we don’t normally think about, like a garbage can and a shower curtain. New furniture and appliances and the other essentials create the sense of this home being theirs, and make them many times more likely to maintain that stable housing.
A donation of $4,000 funds all of Operation Come Home for one day. Our drop-in, our mental health, sexual health and addiction programs. Plus our school, employment services, housing services and social enterprises. All this, and our hydro, water and rent!
A donation of $7,400 funds our Achievement Centre support system for one month. Youth that participate in our school have access to special support workers who help them get through school and manage many of the obstacles they face in doing so. Our two support workers specialize in very different things – one assists our homeless youth in navigating school, housing, employment, addictions and mental health. The other assists them in dealing with the criminal justice system.
A donation of $10,500 gets us ¼ of the way toward our next big goal – buying a second truck for BottleWorks! Our number one social enterprise has become so successful that we can easily expand – once we get that second truck. This would mean double the employment opportunities for our youth (from 12 to 24 per year), double the individual and corporate partners who become involved with OCH, and double the revenue for us every year.
Share your fundraiser with us on social media!
Maybe we can help boost your fundraiser. Maybe we just want to say thank you. Either way, we’d love to hear what you’re doing! Follow us and keep us in the loop here:
Twitter: @ochottawa
Instagram: @ochottawa
Facebook: Operation Come Home
YouTube: Operation Come Home Charity
We invite you and your team to come for a tour of our building at 150 Gloucester. Come before, during or after your fundraiser so you can present your donation in person and we can share it with our followers! For information, questions, or to sign up, email Eric eric@operationcomehome.ca