There are a number of dynamics at play on Giving Sports that make the average donation to an organization on Giving Sports so much higher than other fundraisers. One of those reasons is that those who participate on Giving Sports are raising money from their friends and family and not strangers.

Yes, I realize that it’s an earth shattering concept. Ok, it’s not at all. The problem with many fundraisers is that they have an incredibly hard time asking for donations from people that don’t live by you. It’s not like Grandma who lives in another state can drive down to get her car washed at your car wash fundraiser. Most the time it’s not reasonable to ship a $5 candy bar across the country to your Aunt. You end up paying almost as much in shipping as the candy bar itself.

What does this usually mean? It means that you have to look outside of your friends and family to people whom you don’t know.

Obviously, this has worked in the past because many people are generous and love to help out children who are fundraising. However, it’s an ugly model with a lot of downsides. The biggest downside of raising money from strangers is that they just aren’t willing to give as much money to your organization as someone who knows you and cares about you.

Instead, Giving Sports makes it dead simple to fundraise from people all over the country and world. It doesn’t matter if your favorite Aunt lives on the other side of the country. They can support you and your organization. Plus, they get the added benefit of seeing how that money’s being used. They can see you and your team.

This is what makes Giving Sports fundraising a unique fundraiser that changes the fundraising model for the better.

I’m still working out the details of what activities should be rewarded on the site, but you can be sure that we’ll be awarding things like emailing your friends and family about Giving Sports fundraising and for those people who end up making a contribution to your organization. We’re also looking to reward people for commenting, uploading photos and other parts of the site.

I’d love to hear if other people have ideas on what activity on Giving Sports should be rewarded. Just leave a comment on this blog post or send us a private note on our Contact Us page.

I think you’re really going to like these new Achievements and the effect they’ll have on your fundraising efforts. Plus, this is just the start. We have a lot more fundraising features that we’ve been working on that we can’t wait to roll out.

For example, one of the most painful things about most fundraisers is that each year you have to start fundraising all over again. Sure, maybe you have some handouts that you used previously and you have some knowledge and experience with the fundraiser that will make it go smoother, but you still start with $0 and have to start raising money from square one again.

Giving Sports online fundraising is great for those sports teams that need to fundraise year after year. The second year you go to fundraise, you’ll realize how much nicer it is to raise money online. Instead of starting from fundraising square one, you can quickly send out an email to all of your supporters from the previous year asking them to support you again this year.

How simple is that? One email to people who have contributed to you in the past, makes it so you don’t have to start fundraising at $0. Instead, you’ll get your fundraising kick started the right way with contributions from your previous supporters.

Just one more reason why Giving Sports fundraising is changing the way sports teams raise money.

One way that Giving Sports has worked to simplify fundraising is by having 8 simple questions that a coach answers to get started. Most of them are super simple like: What do you want your team name to be on the website?

Once we get these 8 questions answered, we can set your organization up in about 10 minutes. That’s what I call simple fundraising.

If you’re interested in the 8 questions, drop us a note in the comments below or on our fill out the simple form on our Help My Organization Fundraise page.

One of the reasons that Giving Sports can fundraise so effectively is that we provide the option for donors to give more than they might have given to a regular fundraiser. For example, we’ve had a number of people making $250 donations to a sports team.

Imagine if you’d asked these people who are willing to give $250 to your team to buy a candy bar or some wrapping paper (or insert other fundraiser of your choice) from you. They most certainly would have supported you. With the candy bars fundraiser, they probably would have opened their wallet and pulled out a $20 bill to buy a bunch of candy bars. With the wrapping paper, you can imagine them buying $50-100 worth of wrapping paper or other good.

This is all well and good, but the problem is that this person was willing to spend $250 to help you fundraise for your team and you didn’t get that money because you didn’t ask.

Plus, most candy bar and wrapping paper fundraisers that I’ve seen will only pay you around 50% of what you raise. That means the team would only actually see $10-$50 from this one donor. With Giving Sports, the team would have raised $200. That’s a huge difference and just one more reason that Giving Sports is changing the way sports teams raise money.

Of course, at Giving Sports we love to embrace technology as well. That’s why we write this sports fundraising blog and it’s also why you can find @givingsports on Twitter.

Many probably wonder why so many people use Twitter. Unfortunately, they’re under the misconception that Twitter is about posting what you recently had for breakfast. Certainly some people use it that way, but that’s not what the majority of people on Twitter do. Twitter is about connecting with people. That’s why we love it so much.

We love hearing from coaches, athletic directors, team mom’s, etc and Twitter is a great way for us to connect with those people. Thanks to the 875+ people that are following us on Twitter already. We’d love to connect with more of you on Twitter. Or you can just follow our updates and see what’s happening with Giving Sports.

Amidst adding all the features and promoting Giving Sports, I took a minute to look at the contributions that have been made on Giving Sports so far. I pulled all the contributions that were made to see what the average contribution was per person. I was pretty astonished with the amount of money people were willing to give.

The average contribution on Giving Sports was: $48 per contribution.

That’s pretty awesome and a tribute to those that are supporting the sports teams that are using Giving Sports to fundraise. $48 per person that contributes is a lot better than someone paying $5 for a candy bar. Especially when you realize that a HUGE portion of that candy bar sale isn’t going to the team, but to some company that provided the candy bar.

Our fundraising goals at Giving Sports are clear:

-Make Sports Fundraising Easy!
-Give the Most Money to the Team!

This is just one small example of why we’re getting closer to reaching those goals.

Cheerleading is a great match for the fundraising program we’ve created on Giving Sports and so we’re glad to have them participate with us. Green Valley Cheer is looking to raise money to be able to order new uniforms (man cheerleading uniforms are expensive) and to help their Varsity cheerleaders raise money to compete at the National Cheer competition in Anaheim, CA.

Let’s all help these tremendous ladies in reaching their fundraising goal by making a contribution to Green Valley Cheer.

If you’re a cheerleading organization that’s looking to raise money, we’d love to provide you a one on one demo of Giving Sports. Let us show you how to make sports fundraising easy!

Always nice to get the word out about Giving Sports. We’re definitely creating something unique that is starting to change how sports teams raise money online. It’s very exciting to get the word out about what we’re doing for fundraising online.

His [Giving Sports] basic platform would let amateur sports teams register and post pages about themselves to draw donations, reducing or eliminating the need for traditional fundraisers such as candy bar sales. Although givingsports.com takes a cut, Lynn calculated it would still net the clubs more than other methods.
…
After canvassing other potential clients, he detected a desire for a similar vehicle for nonsports groups. So he developed givingsquare.com.

Giving Sports actually takes one of the smallest percentages in the fundraising industry. This is one of my main goals on Giving Sports. I want to give as much of the contribution someone makes back to the organization it was meant to support. It makes me sick to hear about someone buying a $5 candy bar and then the fundraising organization only gets $2. That’s just wrong and Giving Sports is trying to change that fundraising model.