If you live in a community large enough to have a professional sports team or university there may be fundraising opportunities for your organization by working at sporting events. Many times sports organizations have jobs set aside that they let nonprofit groups perform so they can earn money. The teams do this as a way of giving to the community and building good community relationships.
Some of the jobs your club or team might be able to do at a sports event are: helping to direct traffic in the parking lot, handing out programs, selling food, setting up before a game or cleaning up after a game.
These jobs may be available for just one game or you may be able to do this job a whole season. Doing some of these jobs just once can earn your club quite a bit of money. For example, cleaning up the stands after a college football game earned one club $1,500.00. This took three hours and around 70 volunteers.
How do you find out about these fundraising opportunities?
Sometimes jobs will be advertised in the newspaper before the beginning of the sports season. Other times you will only find out about these jobs by word of mouth. If you want to find out if these types of jobs are available you can start by calling the public affairs office of the teams. This office will probably be able to help you or tell you where else to call.
Before you commit to this type of fundraiser make sure you know everything about the job. You need to make sure you will have enough volunteers willing and able to do these jobs. Some of them are done in bad weather and late at night. The sports organization will provide you with the equipment you need to do the job and will probably have paid workers working along side with you. It’s always a good idea to have too many volunteer than not enough. And make sure you have adults from your organization present to help supervise if your volunteers are children or young adults.
These types of fundraisers are usually hard work. But, the amount you can earn for your charity or club is worth the effort. I recommend considering this type of fundraising activity.