Choir Fundraisers: The Best Fundraising Ideas for Choirs

Looking for fundraising ideas for your choir? Like any nonprofit organization, choirs rely on the financial support of friends, family, and the community. Choirs are an integral part of the community and require support towards the costs of hosting events, traveling, rehearsal space, and other necessary means to continue operation.

If you want to achieve your choir’s donation and fundraising goals, we’ve compiled a list of top fundraising ideas specifically tailored for choirs.

What We’ll Cover:

Our #1 Fundraising Idea for All Types of Choirs: Peer-to-Peer and Crowdfunding Campaigns
More Great Choir Fundraising Ideas
O ur Donor-Friendly Crowdfunding Platform Supports Choir Fundraising Campaigns
Planning Your Choir Fundraiser
Conclusions for Choir Fundraisers

Our #1 Fundraising Idea for All Types of Choirs: Peer-to-Peer and Crowdfunding Campaigns

One of the most popular and effective trends in nonprofit fundraising is peer-to-peer fundraising. With this fundraising strategy, choir members send personalized donation requests via social media and targeted emails. By allowing choir members to tap into their networks, they cast a wider net for requesting donations while building your choir’s online presence and brand.

In a typical choir crowdfunding campaign, each member takes responsibility for securing a specific donation amount. This accountability can be further broken down by setting individual goals for finding a certain number of donors, each contributing a minimum donation (e.g., twenty donors pledging $20 each). We have hosted several 30/30/30 Crowdfunding Campaigns where choir members have a 30-day window to secure 30 donors of $30 or more.

The benefit of crowdfunding is that costs and time commitment to participants are minimal and usually kept to promoting the crowdfunding website. Sounds much better than selling overpriced candy and cookie dough, right? Yet, due to this powerful technology and friendly competition, the financial rewards can be quite large.

More Great Choir Fundraising Ideas

If you’re looking for more of a special event to bring choir members together with your community, we have you covered. Here are some more great ideas for choir fundraising.

Benefit Concert, Dinner Show, or Fundraising Gala Event

A natural fundraising idea for choirs is hosting a benefit concert, dinner show, or gala. Choirs can further share their impact by including a choir performance in the event. Fundraising comes from ticket sales, table purchases, and event sponsorships.

One of the critical things to be mindful of when hosting a dinner or gala is the logistics of organizing such an event. This includes the added cost of the venue and possibly catering for the gala, as well as the effort and time needed to find event sponsors. However, with proper event marketing, the funds from hosting a formal event can be well worth it.

Many choirs are also hosting virtual gala events and happy hours.

Custom Merchandise Sales

Custom printed merchandise can help raise funds, boost awareness, and improve visibility for your choir. Capture supporters’ attention and ensure that your cause is at the forefront of people’s minds by providing eye-catching personalized printed products for sale. Think travel mugs, t-shirts and polos, tote bags, and more.

Trivia Night for the Choir

Trivia nights are easy choir fundraisers with a more informal atmosphere. In keeping with the choir theme, the trivia topic can be about musicals, music genres, topics relevant to the choir (i.e., religious questions for gospel choirs, mainstream age-appropriate TV shows for student choirs), or other fun topics. Revenue comes from registration fees to participate in the trivia night and a small percentage of food and drink sales. The benefit of this fundraising event is that it is simpler to organize and typically takes place at a restaurant or bar that will welcome the added business without additional cost to the choir. However, the proceeds will likely be considerably less because the event is on a much smaller scale, and the registration fee is smaller than a concert or gala ticket.

Consider hosting a silent auction or raffle fundraiser to boost profits.

Local Business Night for the Choir

Another easy choir fundraiser is a local business night. Local businesses, such as restaurants, bars, or lounges, will often be open to donating a small percentage of the evening’s proceeds to the choir’s cause. This event works well if a choir member is also a business owner and offers a great way to mingle with local community supporters.

Our Donor-Friendly Crowdfunding Platform Supports Choir Fundraising Campaigns

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Planning Your Choir Fundraiser

Whether the event your choir chooses is big or small, here are some fundamental steps to plan for a successful choir fundraising event.

Define the Choir Fundraising Goal

Before deciding which event to pursue, understand the fundraising goal the choir needs to achieve. Some things to consider in the fundraising goal:

Have the cost of performance venues and rehearsal spaces increased in the past few years? Should an impending venue cost increase be considered?
Will there be additional tours or travel costs for an added line-up of performances or competitions for the year?
Is there new equipment, choir robes, or other costs that need to be purchased?

Also, when choosing choir fundraisers, consider if there are additional costs for hosting the event that should be included in the fundraising goals:

Venue cost
Food and beverage
Catering
Prizes or giveaways
Gift bags
Audio/visual equipment

Successfully achieving a fundraising goal begins with meticulously planning the end goal to know how much is needed. Then, work with an event fundraising budget to make the magic happen.

Utilize an Online Fundraising or Donation Platform

Choosing a donation platform that meets your needs is essential to accomplishing your choir fundraising goals. An online donation platform allows your members to easily reach a larger network through social media. Our crowdfunding platform generates individual fundraising pages for each choir member so they can reach out to their networks. Also, donation platforms provide real-time updates on how close the choir is to reaching its goal. This comes in handy when there are milestone pushes towards finishing up the goal. Another reason why a donation platform is needed is the ability to receive donations through a secure website that encrypts personal information, such as contact information and credit card details.

Maximize Your Donations

There are several choir fundraising ideas to maximize the donations from your supporters.

Corporate Matching: Promote the possibility for donors to reach out to their employers to see if they offer corporate matching gifts. Simply by donors inquiring with large companies and employers, goals can often be doubled with little effort.

Raffles or Auctions: By selling raffle tickets, your choir fundraisers will receive a noticeable uplift in donations. The raffle drawing can be made in one round of giving away prizes or split into several rounds through the night to continue promoting raffle sales. Auctions can be hosted throughout the entire evening. The key to hosting a successful raffle or auction is having enthusiastic volunteers to promote sales or auction bids throughout the event and securing exciting and attractive prizes. The difference between both options is considering which will receive more donations: several higher-value bids or a large number of small raffle purchases.

Fundraising raffles and online charity auctions can also be excellent stand-alone events when managed with our fundraising platform. Our software platform has amazing features to run these events virtually, including:

Fundraising thermometer to track online fundraising progress
Live Stream video platform for virtual fundraising events
Sponsor promotion via sponsor logos and links to website and social media
Easy social media share options
Text to Give feature to make promoting the fundraiser easy
Ability to incorporate peer to peer fundraising in raffles, where choir members sell raffle tickets via a personal fundraising page

DoJiggy offers unique travel vacation packages that can be used for high-end raffle and auction fundraising.

Finding Community Sponsors: Sponsors help minimize the cost of hosting fundraising events. They can also assist by donating high-value prizes, marketing, or food and beverages. Finding sponsors can take a lot of effort and outreach, so sponsorship inquiries should begin as soon as possible.

Conclusions for Choir Fundraisers

No matter the choice of choir fundraising ideas, taking the steps to properly plan the event, holding choir members accountable for their goals, utilizing a great fundraising platform, and maximizing donations will help achieve your choir fundraising goals. Good luck with your choir fundraising!

DoJiggy offers these excellent campaign options for choir fundraising events.