A Great Fundraiser

The economy being what it is, charities are looking for new ways to make money and you may be asked to help the ones you support. My bookclub supports our local community’s efforts to build a new library and, as a result I have been involved in organizing some fundraisers in support of that effort. The most entertaining fundraiser we hosted was a take on the Food Network show “Throwdown with Bobby Flay”. If you are looking for ways to help the organizations you support, you might give this one a try. It was a lot of fun and very successful.

It all started over cocktails one afternoon when two of our members got in a discussion about which of them made better country-fried steak. Originally we were going to have a dinner party and judge them ourselves. One thing led to another and we ended up deciding to invite people from our community to come and be the judges. The invitees would pay $100 a plate for the privilege of taking part in this event. The first hurdle was where to hold our event. One of our bookclub members has a kitchen in which two people can cook fairly comfortably and a yard in which we could easily seat all the guests. She entertains outside a lot and owns several sets of tables and chairs. We would have rented tables and chairs had this not been the case.

One of the keys to this event was carefully making up the guest list. We chose not to issue any sort of open invitation. Instead, we brainstormed and came up with a list of people we felt were likely to want to participate. We also came up with a list of people who we felt certain would regretfully decline but would send us their $100. That allowed us to get contributions from many more people that we could comfortably seat. We created custom invitations and, for the event, matching score cards, bookmarks and raffle tickets.

The five members of our club who were not in the cook-off provided side dishes to go along with the country-fried steak. We also had three appetizers and two deserts. We served red and white wine, water and soft drinks. Cooking country-fried steak meant a fairly informal theme, but because we were charging $100 a plate we wanted to make this a nice, fun event. One of our members acted as the hostess and, as our guests arrived, she greeted them and had them fill out cards for door prizes. We had a bar with the husbands acting as bartenders. Those of us who were not cooking served as waitresses. We all wore matching aprons and tiaras and worked through the crowd serving trays of appetizers during the cocktail part of the evening.

We had a buffet line set up with the side dishes when it was time to eat and allowed our guests to help themselves. Once they had returned to their tables we brought them one portion of each cook’s steak, on different colored plates. We had score cards and little pencils on the tables for our guests to rate their steaks. We included criteria like “appearance, taste, texture, smell and overall” and had them rate the dish on a point scale. The attendees had a lot of fun with that! No one knew which colored plate came from which cook. We served deserts and drew for door prizes while the scores were being tallied. Then we made some “thank you” speeches and announced the winner. We raised $10,000 with this event and it was tremendous fun both for our guests and for us.

Everything we needed was either donated or the bookclub paid for it so the library building fund received all of the proceeds. Good organization is critical to the success of an event like this one. Make sure you have at least one really detail oriented person who is willing to be in charge!

Fundraising can be deadly. If you think outside the box a bit, you can come up with a fun way to help your favorite charity. I know that every person who attended our Throwdown had a great time, was glad to have been invited and felt the evening was well worth the price. Now that’s a successful fundraiser!