One of the most devastating cancers of all is Leukemia and the costs to fight it are immensely expensive. When a child has leukemia it is even more devastating threatening to cut a life short. Many times communities will rally together to have fundraisers to cover the costs. Generally the whole community and several fundraisers can come up with the funds with a couple of large donations. To attract large donors, it pays to have the public relations and show a consciousness effort to reach the goal for the treatment. Every year bone morrow transplants costs in crease. One of the fundraisers you might wish to consider is a car wash fundraiser. A pre-sale ticket car wash fundraiser can make significantly larger dollars than a normal car wash fundraiser. Let?s discuss pre-sale ticket strategies for a moment.
PRE-SALE TICKETS
You should seriously consider selling presale tickets for your car wash. There are a lot of advantages in pre-selling your tickets such as:
You know about how many people will come to your car wash ahead of time
66% of the ticket buyers never show up but you?ve already got the money
If it rains you?re washed up but not washed out
You will also have use of the money in advance even in the event of rain. Your rain date might be three weeks later yet you have most of the money in your coffers now. Important monies that can go towards your goal for the treatment.
Let?s take one of our 1990 car washes. It was for the local high school band. There were one hundred plus students in the band. The average student sold twenty tickets at $5.00 each. The presale ended up about $10,000. That in it self would be great, but it gets better. The day of the event we raised $985.00 in drive-ups. Some of the girls on the drill team waved tall flags and others held poster board signs that brought the cars in all right. We washed 408 cars. Wow, were we tired! We had two solid lines of cars at least fifteen deep all day long. 201 cars were drive-ups with no presale tickets. With tips included that made up the $985.00. That left 207 cars worth of presale with tickets. But you say, How can that be? 207 times $5.00 = only $1,035.00. That?s right. Since our lines were so long a lot of people didn?t claim their tickets or never intended on coming in the first place or forgot or had some thing else to do that day. I believe it was a combination of all these reasons. Whatever the reason, the money went to a good cause. We?ve had many many fundraisers that have been equally successful over the years.
Now someone will have to typeset these tickets and have them printed. There is probably someone in your group who is a graphic artist or really good with a PC or MAC computer. They?ll do fine. The tickets should be eight to ten on a page. You should print them on colored paper so they are not easily duplicated. You should pick a color that matches with your church, club or school?s colors. Have the tickets cut. Put the individual tickets into piles of twenty. Put a piece of cardboard or poster board the exact size underneath each stack. Buy some rubber cement. Put about ten stacks of twenty tickets on top of each other and put them in a vice. Paint the rubber cement on the left side of the ticket book and let dry for one hour. Repeat until you have enough booklets for each member. You might want to print another dozen booklets just in case. If the tickets are selling fast, you don?t want to run out. That will break your momentum.
You should have frequent ticket sales progress meetings with the people selling the car wash tickets. That way, if sales aren?t meeting goals you can help motivate members or reorganize the group.
Tickets can be expensive to print. Ask a local print shop to advertise on the back and become a sponsor in exchange for half price or free printing of the tickets. Most print shops do binding so you may be able to trade for that and save you the time and aggravation of binding the ticket books yourself. Print shops will do a more professional job at binding than you can do on your first time trying. Professional tickets are more presentable and look more official when selling to customers. This will help your group in their selling efforts.
When a community unites in a common cause miracles can occur, all this positive energy and mind power may significantly help the child win their battle with leukemia. Work together and work smart to raise the funds needed and the awareness required to rid the world of this terrible problem and save your local VIP from leukemia. Think on this.
Lance Winslow
