How To: Plan an Animal Shelter Fundraiser

Holding a fundraiser or a drive for a local shelter is a great way to help out! You can collect donations such as toys, food, and collars or even money. Here are some recommended steps.

1. Contact a shelter. Find out exactly what your local shelter needs – even ask about the brands they prefer. Find shelters in your area.
2. Recruit help. Talk to your friends to help you organize the event, collect donations and deliver them to the shelter. Assign concrete tasks to everyone who wants to help, like being the contact for the shelter, or designing and hanging all of the posters.
3. Decide on a location and a date. Choose a date that makes sense in your community. You could do this at your school, your house of worship, the local shelter or even your backyard.
4. What’s it all about? Come up with what your event will be and think about how to make it as big and fun as possible. Will you be selling homemade dog biscuits? Doing a dog wash? Running a donation drive? Whatever it is, make sure you have all of the supplies and equipment you need to see it through.
5. Publicize the event. Make sure you advertise as much as you can for your event. Get your friends involved through Facebook, get permission to hang posters in stores around town, even see if a local newspaper will put out a bulletin.
6. Make it happen. Arrive early to the location to make sure everything is set up in time and you haven’t forgotten anything important. Don’t forget to get a list of donors’ names, addresses and emails so you can send thank-you notes.
7. Wrap it up. Make sure everything is in order, whether that means sorting and packaging items or counting the donated money. Contact the shelter and agree upon a delivery date and write a generic thank you note to all of the donors and write a brief description of the shelters receiving the donations.