Holiday Fundraising Ideas: Fresh Ways to Engage Donors During the Busy Season

Mark: Welcome to Elevate Your Event, your favorite podcast for transforming fundraising events. Join us weekly for expert tips and creative ideas to make your next event a standout success. The holiday season is just getting started, and that means it's time to start thinking about year-end events and giving. In this episode, the Home Team shares fresh ideas for festive fundraisers, creative themes, and smart ways to keep donors engaged through the busiest time of year.

Jeff: Everybody wants to know. What do they want to know? Well, they want to know how you like to cook your turkey, how you like to serve it. Cook turkey. That's right. We're heading into the holiday season, and so we got turkey. Gobble, gobble, gobble. The thing I don't get is sometimes people serve turkey on Christmas. And I'm kind of like, ham or beef or?

Elise: Lamb or beef or... Yeah, prime rib.

Jeff: Okay, well, let's cover the two main meals. We're talking holidays here. Let's talk about the two main meals. So, Elise, what is your preferred meal for Thanksgiving and your preferred meal for Christmas Day?

Elise: A preferred meal for Thanksgiving, definitely a turkey. Okay, turkey. There's a shocker. You're not going to ask me how I cook it, are you?

Jeff: Well, how do you?

Elise: She comes to my house. I don't. I go to his house.

Jeff: You don't cook the turkey. Okay, I get it. Christmas dinner. Christmas Day.

Elise: Whatever Dr. Porter's cooking, I guess. Something red meat-ish, something that you don't eat every day, something special. Not turkey.

Jeff: Okay, anything but turkey. And I'm going to throw in another one because I know you pretty well. You're probably not going for fish either on Thanksgiving Day or on Christmas Day.

Elise: Probably not salmon. I have a hard time with salmon. I would try it, which every time you cook it, I do try it. And definitely, for appetizers, for any meal, definitely not caviar.

Jeff: Oh, we're going to talk about that one too. Turkey for Thanksgiving. And my husband, Josh, makes it. So I don't know what he does, but he's pretty good. And I do know he brines it for a couple days.

Mark: That's a technique. That's definitely a good one.

Jeff: And then I'm going to switch it up a little. Christmas day. One thing we really like is a Scandinavian smorgasbord.

Mark: A little pickled fish. Some pickled herring, Elise.

Elise: Yikes. Some cucumbers. I'll eat the cucumbers, but it's not touching the fish.

Jeff: So I actually end up typically cooking two Thanksgiving turkeys because of the number of people that come over.

Elise: Yeah, me too. Same.

Jeff: So I dry brine mine. I've moved to that. I think that works really well. You definitely got to throw some butter under the skin and fresh herbs. And I have one on a low-smoking charcoal fire and then I have another one on my Traeger. I usually ask people which one do you like better and I don't tell them which one is which. I kind of like the charcoal one a little better honestly.

Mark: Yeah, it's the charcoal one.

Jeff: Christmas, we change it up every once in a while. We try to go with something rich, luxurious. So we've done prime rib roast. We've done beef tenderloin roast. And then this last year, we did short ribs. That was definitely a labor of love because those have to braise for hours. That one was probably a 15 or 16 hour labor of love. It was good. I mean, they turned out really good. I also do a rib roast but I spatchcock it. And then I do a rosemary salt on it. In the rosemary salt, it's got garlic, rosemary, thyme, lemon zest, and then coarse sea salt.

Mark: Did you get it from that guy on YouTube?

Jeff: Yes, exactly. That's a really good salt. And I do it with chickens too during the year. But then the one that always steals the show is I have a Big Green Egg, so I'm a charcoal guy, lump charcoal. I put the turkey on there whole, I inject it with the Cajun butter and then Cajun seasoning on the outside and just let it smoke until it's done. Everyone loves it. We just got my son a Big Green Egg for his wedding gift.

Mark: Oh, what a great gift.

Jeff: So anyway, is this a cooking show? We should have a food segment. I'm talking about the holidays and fundraising and events and ideas and all that kind of stuff. So what do we got?

Mark: So this came up the other day because it's like, what are we going to talk about on this episode? For those people who are courageous enough or ambitious enough to want to run a fundraiser during the holidays, God bless all of you.

Jeff: It's a challenge. How do you tackle the inherent challenges of people being really busy? Between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, people are really busy. So how do you secure attendance? People get stressed out. So the question is, what are they doing or what could anybody be doing to try to make sure that you've got the max number of people there?

Elise: Well, one thing I was just thinking about is Christmas parties. My weekends, like Fridays or Thursday nights, start to get all eaten up the weeks before Christmas.

Mark: You want to do like the high school graduation thing where it's an open house. Drop in, eat my food, drink my drinks, throw the card in the bucket and leave.

Elise: That's actually not a bad idea. Hey, we're this charity. We're having an open house. We're going to serve food and drinks. Stop by, drop off your donation. And then you have the Handbid app where you have all the things and people don't even have to be there to bid.

Jeff: Yeah, we'll close the auction Sunday afternoon at five. There you go. That's a good idea for the donor appreciation type of year-end event. Come in. This is our annual donor appreciation holiday event. Here's the donor cards, drop in what you want. Food and drink is included. And take your little Christmas cookie goody bag.

Elise: Love it. Well, and even though that theory could work, that type of event sounds awesome. You're mentioning that could be a Saturday afternoon, not a Saturday night kind of thing. So I would say my first piece of advice to anybody wanting to run an event during the holidays is probably avoid Friday and Saturday nights and also Thursdays.

Jeff: Thursdays get busy too. So maybe you go beyond the holiday party. Maybe you do something a little bit different. So ugly sweater. I love that. So open your ugly sweater. Make it fun.

Mark: We're on this big kick of changing up the venue. Maybe it shouldn't be in the hotel ballroom.

Jeff: How fun would it be to do a holiday movie night in the park? Fire pit tables, blankets. Maybe that's your giveaway too. Get the massive LED screen out. We're watching movies all night long. We're going to watch Christmas Vacation and Elf.

Elise: Or you make it family-friendly.

Jeff: My favorite Christmas movie, Die Hard. That's a Christmas movie.

Elise: Maybe I should watch that one.

Jeff: To me, that would be fun. People can buy a ticket and you bring your kids and you serve popcorn.

Mark: Hot chocolate.

Jeff: Now, in Colorado, that could be dangerous. It could blizzard the night before.

Elise: If you're an event planner, this state is rough.

Jeff: Maybe that would be fun, movie night. I think that'd be a lot of fun. I don't have time to pull that off this year, but I'm going to throw it to our board for next year as another fun fundraiser. Or again, middle of the day, Sunday afternoon.

Mark: Family matinee.

Jeff: Colorado's not so bad when the sun's out in December. Let's go to the next one that we noodled on, doing some form of a contest. Gingerbread contest.

Elise: Gingerbread contest. And get your kids involved. Make it family-friendly. And then vote on it. People pay to vote. A dollar per vote. I want this one so much I'm going to give it 10 votes, and that's 10 bucks. Get your friends and family to vote for your thing.

Mark: We've done some of those fashion show contests and you can vote. Those are kind of fun. But unique ways to maybe get people involved. A lot of times you're doing a year-end event to kind of fill in the gaps of maybe what you didn't raise throughout the year.

Elise: What are fun, unique ways that you're not pressing people too much during the holidays, but still trying to get a little something and offer them a little bit of fun while you're at it?

Jeff: I mean, or even auction off the teams. Like, hey, I'm going to bring in a group of ringers here and let's just start bidding on and betting on teams who are going to win this particular contest. And you've seen the taste-of events, right? You could even do a winner taste-of and that would be kind of fun.

Mark: Also, what about pay-to-play? I'm picturing my kids' holiday parties at school. There's always games. What if you took some of those games and made them for adults and paid to play?

Jeff: There's pay-to-play games at events I go to. I think I just dropped a solid thousand bucks on dunking Elise about 40 times at her last fundraiser.

Elise: You were our biggest moneymaker.

Jeff: Maybe not dunk tank in December. Why not? Maybe not in Colorado.

Mark: Throw snowballs.

Jeff: You could do games like that. Or karaoke night. That would be fun.

Elise: Let's just get away from the hotel. Get away from the gala. Get away from the seated, plated dinner. Try something different.

Jeff: We just went to Solstice and our friend Sky Madden at Fiddler's. It's fun to walk into events like that. And it's blown away. This year you walked into the tent to the right was this unbelievable charcuterie board thing with caviar.

Elise: I skipped that.

Jeff: I did not. I opened up my phone and bought it. For my own party, it was so good. Shipped overnight from Italy.

Elise: What about what you saw right when you walked in on the left? There was a lady wearing this costume. She was standing in it. It was like a princess bell dress. The outside of the dress were layers of wooden champagne holders. She was the champagne holder. Her dress was the champagne holder.

Jeff: And then you continue going in and they brought in this light-up floor with the DJ booth. The floor lit up when you stood on it. So when people are dancing the floor had this really cool vibe. And outside they had fire pits so you could go outside of the tent in the back. And then they had a movie theater. They had fire dancers.

Elise: This year's theme was Northern Lights, Apres Ski. Some dude, a board member, was wearing the European ski outfit. It was awesome. They put a theme out every year. There's not a single person that shows up not dressed to the nines.

Jeff: This is the type of vibe we're talking about. You make your event so fun that they can't wait to come back next year. They plan their own Christmas parties around it.

Elise: I think that's the key to getting people to come to an event during the holiday season. Make it so much fun and not just your standard Christmas party. Do something that you can add in the fundraising elements, the revenue generators, the games. But give yourself a theme that people cannot resist.

Jeff: And come up with something creative on how to get people there. Maybe it's buy one, bring one. And it has to be somebody new.

Elise: Or if it's the holiday season, buy one, gift one. Same thing.

Jeff: My church tries to do this with some amount of success. I'm going to buy a couples ticket, but then you're going to get two free tickets, but they have to be new to the organization. I think that kind of stuff would be fun. That's a great way to start building awareness going into the next fundraising season.

Mark: What's the idea of even doing an event during this time? What are the pros?

Jeff: The cons are that people are busy. But how does the fact that end-of-year giving is happening come into play? I mean, everybody's thinking end of year. You've got Giving Tuesday. A lot of the state giving days are in the first week of December. Colorado's is. And so you have to compete with that. With all of that going on, why would I ask my donors again for a donation? Well, I wouldn't. What I would do is create an experience they want to come to, and then I think a lot of that will just handle itself.

Elise: I agree. I think you could do some low-pressure things. Like maybe you have a tree and it's a giving tree. Or take an envelope off the tree and go buy the gift for somebody. Or just a giving back campaign.

Jeff: I do a thing up in Grand County every year. And we do a toy drive. Maybe it's just an opportunity for people to give back. Toy drives are great.

Elise: That could be very appropriate for many organizations. I'm thinking of food pantries.

Jeff: There we go. You have everybody bring something for the food drive. But I think it's also an opportunity to leverage company matches at a low-pressure sales-ask point. Which you can do, shameless plug for Handbid and our partnership with Double the Donation, you could certainly sell your tickets and right there turn that on. And if they work for a corporation it'll tell them, yes, you have a donation match system. And then all the sudden you've kicked off a workflow for them, showing them how to do it. I just think it's a tool that should be leveraged year-round.

Mark: And one other thing that we've seen a lot is many events have themed Christmas trees. Maybe you need a Christmas tree.

Jeff: So you head to the event and you have a Barbie tree. The Griswolds are going to the Christmas tree auction.

Elise: What's the price of Christmas trees these days? Are you an artificial guy or a real guy?

Jeff: Artificial. Yeah, we got the 15-foot Costco one.

Mark: I'm going into the woods.

Elise: I had to drop 200 plus dollars on a tree that was literally, I think, cut two weeks before. But it lasted for like five weeks after Christmas.

Jeff: The auction is a good idea. I'm all about making Christmas easier. Or even if it's a real tree, we'll install it for you. We'll install and we'll come get it. That's part of the package. Bidding starts at a thousand bucks. Well, we have a client that does that. They have 300 trees. They have a thousand people come to their event every year. There's never a seat empty in the house. And people literally will spend a lot of money on them. Look, I need a Christmas tree. I don't have time to decorate it. I don't want to. And what these trees look like, it would cost me more. And I'm going to come here, donate, and get my tree, my time back. And it's going to be more beautiful than anything I would have ever done.

Elise: And you're giving to the cause you support.

Jeff: And you're giving to the cause that you love. That's a great idea. Let's end it with that.

Mark: Well, there's more holidays. We're going to do a Christmas episode. All right. You're going to come with your trivia that we're all going to fail on.

Jeff: Let's do it. Happy fundraising.

Mark: If you enjoyed our show, please take a moment to leave us a review. You can find us on Apple, Google, and Spotify. Don't forget to subscribe for more great content. And if you're a fan of video, check us out on YouTube. Until next time, happy fundraising.