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Different Types of Church Fundraisers

Church fundraising is a great way to earn extra money for your church while also building member relationships. Church fundraising provides an effective way to reach out to the community for contributions as well as to spread the word about your Church. There are so many different types of fundraising that choosing the right one for your Church can be a challenging task. In this article we will look at fundraising and the different types. We will also look at how you can make your fundraiser better by accepting credit and debit card donations.

Church Fundraiser Types

Direct Sales Fundraiser Your Church Group orders an inventory of fundraising items to be sold by your volunteers. The item is provided to your volunteers who sell the item, deliver it, and receive payment, usually in one trip.

Catalog Sales Fundraiser This is also called Catalog Sales. Your Church Group volunteers are each provided a fundraising catalog to show potential donators and an order form. Contributors select items from the catalog and record the order on the order form. Once your members are done, all order forms are counted and sent to the fundraising company which ships the items to the contact person for your group fundraiser. Your members and volunteers then deliver the items to your supporters.

On-line Fundraiser On-line fundraising is generally handled in one of two ways. In the first, a unique website for your church is created. You encourage donators to purchase items or services from that site and you receive a percentage of sales. The second way is to have a coded link on your Church’s website that will take the visitor to a personalized page on a company’s product site. Again, you encourage supporters to make purchases through the coded link and your group receives a percentage of the sales.

Special Event Fundraiser These types of fundraisers usually consist of setting up an event and inviting supporters to participate. Events such as car washes, dinners, raffles, plays, and auctions are common but there are lots more to consider.

Accepting Debit and Credit Card contributions

Once you’ve successfully setup your church fundraiser, you can ask for contributions through your website, by email, on flyers or newsletters, and in written letters. Make sure to include good instructions on how contributions can be made. Donations could be a weekly offering, monthly withdrawal or a one-time donation, depending on the member’s choice.

To really speed up the process you could offer your supports the ability to contribute to the fundraiser using their debit or credit card. This would allow them to easily make a donation without the hassle of dealing with cash. A lot of people don’t carry cash anymore because it isn’t convenient. Instead they carry credit and debit cards.

To accept credit and debit card donations you would need a way to process credit cards. There are lots of options including pos terminals, and online payment gateways.

In this article we talked about the different types of church fundraising and also how to make it easy for people to support with their credit card and debit card.

This article was written by Todd Nelson, Marketing Director for Capital Merchant Solutions, Inc (www.holyprocessing.com). CMS has been in the merchant account business for nearly 10 years, and offers free merchant accounts to both online and retail businesses. This article may be republished as long as absolutely no changes are made, and the resource box is included. Copyright 2007 - Capital merchant Solutions, Inc. - All rights reserved.

- Todd Nelson

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 4:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.