A church fundraiser has a problem no other nonprofit has. The people most likely to help are the same people who already give every week.
That single fact should decide which event you run. A spaghetti supper attended entirely by members moves money from one pocket of the congregation to another, minus the cost of the spaghetti. It also spends volunteer goodwill you will need again in March.
The events worth running are the ones that bring in people who do not attend, or that ask members for something other than money. Everything below is sorted on that test.
What a church already owns
Most congregations are sitting on assets that other organizations rent:
- A commercial kitchen and a hall. Feeding 200 people is an ordinary Tuesday for a church and a logistical crisis for anyone else.
- A room that seats hundreds, with a sound system and someone who runs it. Weekly. This is the thing other nonprofits pay thousands for.
- A volunteer base that shows up. Reliable people who already know each other and already work together.
- Musicians. Almost every congregation has more musical talent in it than the average small town has anywhere else.
- Standing in town. A local business will take a call from a church it has never worked with.
Any event that uses four of those five is worth considering. An event that uses none of them is a bake sale with extra steps.
Events that bring in outsiders
A production. The strongest use of what a church already has. You have the room, the sound, the musicians and the volunteers, and a show gives the community a reason to walk through a door they may never have walked through. It runs multiple nights, carries sponsorship and program advertising, and every person in the cast brings their own family. Lead time is the cost: six to nine months, and somebody has to produce it.
A concert series. Bluegrass, gospel, a community choir, a local band. The building is already set up for it. Charge admission or take a freewill offering at the door, and sell concessions in the hall afterward. That is where the margin is.
A fish fry, barbecue or pancake breakfast open to the town. Different from a members-only supper in one respect that matters: it is advertised outward. Put it on a road sign, price it for a family, and run it at a time when people are already driving past.
Trunk or treat, fall festival, Easter egg hunt. Free to attend and not fundraisers on the day. They are how a town meets a congregation, and they make everything else easier to sell for the next two years. Judge them on attendance by people you did not recognize.
Renting the hall. Weddings, receptions, funeral dinners, community meetings, a polling place, a weekday preschool. Steady income from an asset that sits empty six days a week. Set a written rate and a damage deposit, and decide in advance who cleans.
Events that ask members for something other than money
A talent or service auction. Members offer what they can do rather than what they can give: a day of yard work, a home-cooked meal for six, a weekend at a cabin, piano lessons, a quilt. Nobody writes a check they cannot afford, and the evening itself is the best-attended thing many churches run.
A work day sold to the community. A youth group washes cars, rakes leaves or stacks firewood for donations. The money is modest and the point is partly the young people doing it.
Sponsored projects. Naming a pew, a window, a paver or a hymnal in memory of someone. This reaches former members, families who moved away and people whose relatives are buried in your cemetery, and it consistently raises more than anyone expects.
Before you pick anything, settle three things
What your denomination and your insurance allow
Raffles and games of chance are restricted or prohibited for many congregations, by their own tradition or by state law, and the rules on charitable gaming vary considerably from state to state. Some insurance policies also exclude particular activities. Ask before you print tickets, not after.
Whether this competes with the offering
An event aimed inward pulls from the same household budget as the weekly offering. Leadership should agree on that openly before the first meeting, and the answer may be that the event needs to be aimed outward instead.
Who is actually going to run it
Name the person before you approve the event. Most church fundraisers fail quietly because four people who are already doing three jobs each absorb a fifth. If nobody will take the chair, the event is not happening no matter what the vote says.
What these raise
| Event | Typical net | Reaches non-members |
|---|---|---|
| Bake sale | $200 to $600 | Rarely |
| Members-only supper | $300 to $1,200 | No |
| Fish fry open to the town | $1,500 to $4,000 | Yes |
| Talent or service auction | $2,000 to $8,000 | Rarely |
| Concert | $1,000 to $5,000 | Yes |
| Hall rental | $3,000 to $15,000 a year | Yes |
| Sponsored project | $5,000 to $40,000 | Yes, including former members |
| A production | $8,000 to $50,000 | Yes, in numbers |
The pattern in that column is the argument. Every event that reaches beyond the congregation earns several times what an inward-facing one does, and it does it without asking the same forty households again.
One event a year, done properly
Churches that raise real money usually run one large event and two small ones, rather than eight of everything. The large event gets the lead time, the sponsorship asks and the outside attention. The small ones keep people busy and bring in a little.
The organizations that struggle are the ones running a fundraiser every six weeks, each one staffed by the same tired dozen people, none of them big enough to matter. Volunteer goodwill is the scarce resource in a congregation. Spend it on one thing worth doing.
If you are considering a show
A church sanctuary is one of the best rooms in most towns for this. The seating is there, the sound system is there, and somebody already knows how to run it. Curtain & Cause books original stage plays and interactive dinner theater written for fundraisers. We bring the script, our actors and a Production Playbook written for that show. Your congregation and your community fill the rest of the cast.
Producing when nobody involved has done it before covers what the job actually is, sponsorship packages covers the asking, and what it costs sets out our pricing.
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.