December is the best month to raise money and the worst month to book anything. Both are true, and the organizations that do well in it are the ones that planned in July.
People give more at Christmas. They also have four weekends, a work party, two school concerts and a family obligation in every one of them, and every other organization in your county wants one of those evenings too. The calendar, not the idea, is what decides how a holiday fundraiser does.
The December calendar, honestly
| Thanksgiving weekend | Better than it looks. Families are already together and already in the mood, out-of-town relatives are in the house looking for something to do, and nothing else is scheduled yet. |
| First weekend of December | The strongest weekend of the month. Book it a year ahead or lose it. |
| Second weekend | Strong, and the most contested. This is where school concerts and church programs land. |
| Third weekend | Workable, and thinning. Company parties take Friday and Saturday nights. |
| The week before Christmas | Avoid. People are travelling, shopping and exhausted. |
| Between Christmas and New Year | Quiet, and underrated for anything aimed at families with relatives in town and nothing to do. |
One rule beats all of this: find out what the schools and the two biggest churches in town have already scheduled before you pick a date. Fifteen minutes of phone calls in January saves an empty room in December.
Ideas, by what they ask of you
Weeks of lead time
Cookie walk. Members bake, buyers fill a box by weight and pay by the pound. Cheap to run, reliable, and the ceiling is low. Good as a second event beside a bigger one, and good on the morning of something else.
Breakfast or brunch with Santa. Families with small children will pay for a photograph and a pancake. Sells out early, runs on a morning that competes with nothing, and the volunteer ask is a single shift. Charge per family rather than per head.
Luminaries or a light display. A donation buys a candle or a bulb dedicated to someone, with the names printed in a program or read aloud. It works because it is about remembering a person, and it earns far above what the materials cost.
Wreath and poinsettia sales. Low margin and reliable, and it reaches people who will not come to an evening event. Best run by one organized person with a spreadsheet and a delivery day.
A few months of lead time
Festival of trees. Businesses decorate and sponsor a tree, the public pays to walk through, and the trees are auctioned at the end. Three revenue lines from one room. It needs a large space for several days and a volunteer to manage each sponsor, and it earns accordingly.
Tour of homes. Five or six decorated houses, a printed map, a timed ticket. The work is recruiting homeowners in spring, not the day itself. In a town with any old housing stock this outperforms everything else per volunteer hour.
Holiday market or craft fair. Vendors pay for tables, you sell food and admission. Predictable, weather-independent indoors, and it brings in people who have never heard of your organization.
Six to nine months of lead time
A holiday production. The highest ceiling on this page and the longest runway. A show runs several nights instead of one, so the same marketing sells three or four audiences. It carries sponsorship and program advertising that a bake sale cannot. And when local people are on the stage, every one of them sells tickets to their own family. That is what fills a room in a town where nobody has heard of you.
The cost of entry is real. Rehearsals run for weeks, somebody has to produce it, and you need a venue with sound that carries. What you get back is an event people put on their calendar every year without being asked.
Ask for sponsorship in the summer
This is the mistake that costs the most, and almost everyone makes it. Holiday sponsorship requests arrive in October and November, when local marketing budgets have already been spent on everyone who asked in the spring. The business that tells you “maybe next year” in November is telling you the truth about their calendar.
Ask in June and July. Nobody else is asking a small business about Christmas in July, the budget still exists, and the person you are asking has time to talk. Organizations that move their asks forward by four months routinely double what they raise with the same list of businesses. Our guide to building sponsorship packages covers what to offer at each level.
What the money actually looks like
Rough figures for a town of any size, for one event:
| Event | Typical net | Volunteers needed |
|---|---|---|
| Cookie walk | $500 to $1,500 | A dozen bakers, four on the day |
| Breakfast with Santa | $1,000 to $3,000 | Fifteen for one morning |
| Luminaries | $2,000 to $6,000 | Two organizers, a crew for one evening |
| Holiday market | $3,000 to $8,000 | Ten, plus a vendor coordinator for months |
| Tour of homes | $5,000 to $15,000 | Six months of recruiting, thirty on the day |
| Festival of trees | $8,000 to $25,000 | A committee, for half a year |
| A holiday production | $8,000 to $50,000 | Thirty to sixty, in small defined jobs |
Those ranges are wide because the room decides. A 200-seat church and an 800-seat arts center are different businesses running the same event.
Four things that go wrong every December
- Picking the date last. The date is the decision. Everything else adjusts around it.
- Running three small events instead of one real one. Three events means three times the volunteer fatigue for less money than one well-run evening. Volunteer goodwill is the resource that actually runs out.
- Competing with your own people. If your members are also running the church program and the school concert, you have scheduled against yourself.
- Pricing like an apology. A $10 ticket to a holiday event in December is underpriced, and it signals that the evening is not worth much. People expect to spend money at Christmas and they are not shopping for the cheapest thing on the calendar.
If you are considering a show
Curtain & Cause books original stage plays and interactive dinner theater written for fundraisers, including Christmas on the Dial, a full-length holiday play staged as a live 1950s radio broadcast. We bring the script, our actors and a Production Playbook written for that show. Your community fills the rest of the cast.
A holiday show needs booking six to nine months out, so the conversation that matters happens in spring. How a holiday show actually makes money goes through the numbers, and what it costs sets out ours.
About this guide
Written by Curtain & Cause. We write original plays for community theaters and work with the nonprofit organizations staging them as fundraisers. Christmas on the Dial is an original full-length play staged as a live 1950s radio broadcast, with the audience as the studio audience.