If you are looking for unusual fundraisers and a unique fundraising opportunity, then the people at Deer Creek High School have provided us with a wonderful solution. The week of March 10, 2008 the students and teachers of Deer Creak held their annual Wonderful Week of Fundraising to raise money for Ally’s House, which helps families of children with cancer.

Their goal was to raise $26,000 and instead with the unique fundraisers and fundraising events they raised $47,245. To raise this amount for such a great cause, the school held a teacher “ugly dress” beauty pageant. This even allowed some of the teachers to show some of their other talents such as their Science teacher reading “Three Pigs” from the wolf’s perspective while showing his chemistry prowess with flammable gasses. The Spanish teacher performed a dance routine with other students and played some cowbells.

To also support the cause, the English teacher sold T-shirts and held auctions in her classroom.

Great job to Deer Creek High School for their ugly dress beauty pageant, lip-syncing, and stand up comedy acts to raise money for Ally’s House!

To read the whole article click here.

Many kudos to Keith Frick and Bob Thunselle; cyclists in Wyoming who have been raising money for the Ronald McDonald House in Denver. They are nearing their $100,000 goal which is needed for a “Wyoming” room in the newly renovated Ronald McDonald House. The Wyoming room will be a place for Wyoming children, who are patients in Denver-area hospitals, and their families can stay.

Keith Frick and Bob Thunselle have been on many bike rides together, some including ridding across the state of South Dakota and through the Mojave Desert and Death Valley in something known as the “Furnace Creek 508.”

Read their whole story.

Barbara Hill, a teacher from Bartlett Elementary, developed a unique way to raise profits through a different kind of bake sale. Barbara and her class make and sell pretzels to help raise the money they need for UNICEF.

Making and selling pretzels helps teach the kids about donating their time and a few principles on how to run a business. Thanks to the Daily Herald for sharing this story and best of luck to Barbara Hill and her pretzel making class!

(Daily Herald - Arlene Miles, 11/12/2007)

Ideas for school projects sometimes occur when you least expect them.

That’s what happened when Barbara Hill read a Scholastic News article with her class. Thus was born an annual fundraiser where fourth-graders at Bartlett Elementary School make fancy pretzels to raise money for UNICEF.

The fundraiser is in its fifth year with about $1,000 raised and donated annually.

The fourth-grade classes alternate weeks to make and sell the pretzels, taking pre-orders on a Monday, making the pretzels on a Thursday, and selling the goodies on a Friday.

About 600-1,000 pretzels are sold for 50 cents apiece each week during the fundraiser.

The students dip pretzel rods into melted chocolate, sometimes spooning the thick concoction onto the pretzel. Parents donate the supplies used to make the treats. The entire process takes about 90 minutes.

“We watch them (the students) like hawks to make sure that their hands stay where they are supposed to while they’re making the pretzels so we don’t get any bacteria in there,” Hill said.

The fourth-grade curriculum also incorporates what it is like to own and maintain a business, Hill added. Producing and selling the pretzels, is, in a way, a miniature business. Thus, the activity serves two purposes: to educate students about charitable work as well as what it takes to run a business.

“This is one of the few fundraising activities where the kids are doing all of the work,” Hill said. They have a greater understanding of what it takes to donate their time.”

Of course, there is one additional benefit from participating in this fundraiser. Students get to eat the leftovers — and who wouldn’t enjoy?

Click Here to read the article

Dance to your fundraising goal has been a unique moto by a dance club based in Bridgwater. Members of the Riviera LeRoc club raised approximately $170 for St Margaret’s Somerset Hospice by doing pavement dance demonstrations.

The dance was a good way to get the community involved for they were also invited to come and take part at some modern jive.

Even without the heatwave the country is sweating through, this would be a great fundraising event to help out your local community. Check out this article from St. Louis, Missouri.

Cool Down St. Louis will host its fifth annual Cool Down Weekend at Busch Stadium two hours before the Cardinals-Brewers games begin on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

About 150 volunteers dressed in yellow caps and holding yellow buckets will collect donations for the organization to provide air conditioners and pay electric bills for the elderly, disabled and needy.

The drive raised almost $20,000 last year.

Read the full article here.

Do you yell “Fore!” or “Geranimo!” or just plain get out of the way at this fundraising event? Take a look at this idea from Nashua, NH we found.

[T]he Golf Ball Drop steadily pulls the fun in fundraising up a notch or two, using a helicopter to disburse 1,000 balls from overhead within moments.

According to event organizer Christina Austin, who is the YMCA of Greater Nashua’s administrative assistant, a former employee came up with this cool fundraising idea, which has grown in popularity each year. The rules are simple and the prizes plentiful.

The thousand golf balls will be dropped from a helicopter owned by Bob Clouthier of CR Helicopters of Nashua at an altitude of 500 feet above an area set up as a golf green at Camp Sargent. Balls are numbered to correspond with each purchase. Should your ball land a hole-in-one, you’ll go home $1,000 richer. There’s a $100 prize for the ball that lands closest to the pin, $75 for balls two through five that are closest to the pin, $50 for the sixth-closest to the pin and $50 for the ball that lands farthest from the pin.

How do you get in on the fun? Balls are being sold at the Nashua and Merrimack YMCAs at $10 each. Anyone who buys five balls will get a sixth one free.

Proceeds will benefit the YMCA’s Y Cares Financial Assistance Program, which lends support to individuals and families in the community who are living on fixed or limited incomes and can’t afford to pay for Y programs and services.

Read the full article here.

Cool fundraising event from New Zealand proves you don’t have to be a traditional athlete to help your fundraising effort.

A brave group of PC gamers are set to become Sport Relief’s first-ever cyber athletes, as the team behind Future Publishing’s PCFormat magazine hold their own marathon games session to raise money for the charity.

[S]ix gamers from [Future Publishing’s PCFormat] magazine will play an epic first-to-a-thousand-kills deathmatch of the multiplayer PC first-person shooter, Quake 4. As they prepare for their challenge, the PCFormat team are appealling to games industry and media readers, to support their fundraising event. Gaming experts believe the marathon session will last anywhere between four and seven hours, which will push the PCFormat gamers to the limit.

The PCFormat Quake 4 Marathon takes place […] two days before thousands of people across the UK run a mile for Sport Relief. Sport Relief is organised by Comic Relief and the BBC and aims to raise much needed-cash to help kids leading tough lives in some of the world’s poorest countries.

Taking a breather from his training regime, deputy editor of PCFormat, Alec Meer comments: “Our usual bouts of Quake 4 last about half an hour before we’re absolutely knackered and slump off to the pub. We’re strictly lunchtime amateurs and not pro-gamers - in other words, this will completely destroy us. PCFormat wanted to do something different to raise some money for Sport Relief - we hope everybody will get behind us, supporting Sport Relief’s first cyber-athletes in the process.”

Read the full article here.

ps, “frag the n00bs” is videogame-speak for “shoot the new/weak players”

From the New Jersey area, we picked up on a fundraising idea called “tricky trays”.

Sometimes called penny auctions or Chinese basket auctions, tricky trays are usually set up as fundraisers for schools, churches, animal shelters and other non-profit organizations, and they are governed by the same state guidelines that control bingo.

The basic setup is this: prizes are displayed on tables with a raffle box near each prize. People buy raffle tickets, usually in bunches, then drop any number of tickets into the box near the prize they want to win. The more tickets you stuff into a box, the better chance you have of winning.

Some tricky trays offer elaborate prizes. One held recently at the Westmount Country Club in West Paterson as a fundraiser for a West Caldwell elementary school offered a trip to Ireland, passes to Walt Disney World and a lap-top computer.

Some raffles are the culmination of sit-down dinners at banquet halls, and others are BYOS (bring your own sandwich) at American Legion halls or firehouses. Raffle ticket prices also vary depending on the swankiness of the affair. Some have a sliding scale for raffle tickets: $1 a ticket for skin care baskets or toasters, and $10 or more for vacation trips or home entertainment electronics.

[…]

The raffles aren’t just popular among fans, but are also a hit at the non-profits they benefit. Barranco said she helped organize a tricky tray auction for her son’s school in November that raised $20,000 to pay for new books and a trophy case.

Marguerite Kenney of the Caldwell College Alumni Association raised $30,000 for student scholarships at an auction in mid-June, where attendees were invited to dress as their favorite movie stars for the evening’s Hollywood theme.

The reason a non-profit can raise so much money in one night is because tricky tray gifts are usually donated — either by local businesses or the members of the non-profit putting on the auction.

Terri Kinsella of West Caldwell said it took a year and more than 50 volunteers to put on her school’s raffle — soliciting prizes, setting up the banquet hall and wrapping baskets. But the event raised nearly $40,000 for field trips, teacher supplies and other programs run by the Home School Association.

Christine Chiovaro of West Milford, who has won a big-screen TV and Disney passes at tricky trays, said the downside to the auctions becoming so popular is that they’ve taken a toll on local merchants who are asked to donate over and over. “Now every organization out there has picked up on it.”

But the fad doesn’t show any signs of slowing down.

Read the full article here.

From Redlands, California, we came across a truly down and dirty fundraising article.

New equipment for the kindergarten playground is important to Lugonia Elementary School Principal Kathy Jeide - so much so that she was willing to bribe her students to help the school get the new equipment.

Last year, she says, students helped with a school PTA fundraiser by bringing in roughly 1,000 box tops from various consumer products ranging from cereal boxes to Ziploc bag boxes. Each top is worth 10 cents when redeemed through the Box Tops For Education program sponsored by General Mills Inc.

This year, Jeide upped the ante during a school assembly. She announced to students that if each classroom brought in 300 box tops, she would eat a worm.

The students raised 9,000 - satisfying their end of the bargain to help acquire brand new tricycles for the kindergarten playground’s re-opening in the fall.

At the assembly Friday morning, she led students and staff in a flag salute outside of her office, followed by the singing of George M. Cohan’s “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

Fifth-grader Jaselin Lopez impatiently uttered an accusation under her breath: “She’s stalling.”

Jeide admitted that she was indeed stalling, as she set out her props and ingredients with a facetious flair on a table draped with a red cloth. The table setting included a fine set of utensils, a classy water glass, a tray of meal worms and a bottle of Pepto-Bismo.

Read the full article here.

Here’s an excerpt we found from a June 25th article from Oregon where contestants secured sponsors to promote them in a hotdog eating contest.

Saturday’s culinary event, held at Aunty’s Pasta at 181 Upper Applegate Road, raised $487 for the Ruch Rural Action Team, a volunteer group that distributes donations during holidays and serves as a command center in emergencies.

The contest was broken down into adult and teenage groups, with a $100 grand prize for the winning adult and $50 for the teen champ.

All competitors had 20 minutes to scarf down as many hot dogs as they could. But the true test came afterward, when they had to hold down the fruits of their labor for 10 minutes or face forfeiture.

If you’re curious, seven dogs plus a bite won for the adult category and six and a half dogs for the teen category.

Read the full article here.