Fundraising Materials and
Tips Available to You
Team Azalea Charities is committed to giving you the resources and sharing our ideas to make your fundraising a positive experience and your fundraising goal a reality. Rest assured, we want to make it as easy as possible with materials to increase awareness of your fundraising campaign and for you to accept donations via credit card, check, or cash with the ability to provide your donors with a thank you note and receipt they can use when filing their 2010 tax return.
The Value of Email
Sending emails to friends, family, and co-workers from your contact list is an extremely efficient and effective way to get the word on your fundraising campaign out quickly. If you don’t think this is personal enough, of course you can cut and paste essentially the same email and personalize it slightly to send out individual emails. Either way, your emails can point to your fundraising web page for individuals interested in making secure credit card donations (see details below) and also attach our downloadable donation form if they wish to donate by writing a personal check they can mail directly to Azalea Charities. This is particularly useful for soliciting donations from businesses or your employer. When checks accompanied by the donation forms are mailed, either by you or your donor directly to Azalea Charities, the charity will send you an email confirming the check has been received. To keep your website up to date with the total amount of funds you’ve raised, you will be required to log into active.com and your website to easily upload the amount of the donation and name of the donor (if they do not wish to remain anonymous) and amount of the donation.
Do keep track of who you send an email to, as well as who on your distribution list ends up making a donation. For those who do not respond, you’ll want to follow up with a second email reminder several weeks to a month after your first email, or maybe one week before the race, to catch those people who had all intentions of making a contribution but forgot to follow through.
Feel free to use our sample fundraising email content that can be copied into your outgoing email and tailored to meet your needs.
Make Your Customized Fundraising Webpage Your Campaign Headquarters
Once again, we have partnered with Active Giving to provide you an individual fundraising web page to serve as a virtual home to inform your prospective sponsors/donors why you have joined Team Azalea Charities and raise money for our Aid for Wounded Warriors. Visit our Team Azalea Charities’ fundraising page and use the drop down menu at the top of the page to view how other runners have customized their pages. The individual web page will also track your donors and the amount you’ve raised against a personal goal that you establish. You won’t personally have to deal with handling any credit card information since Team Azalea Charities and Active Giving will take care of those details for you.
Active Giving provides the ability for you as a Team Azalea Charities fundraiser to accept secure on-line credit card donations, making it much easier for prospective donors to respond to your emails with only a few clicks of the mouse. Make sure you provide your prospective donors with the link to your individual webpage if you want the donation attributed to your fundraising goal. Active will send a donation confirmation email to your donors and a separate email notifying you when an online credit card donation is made on your web page.
Post Customized Flyers at Work or Local Businesses
Creating flyers to post at work or at local business can be a time consuming proposition, even though this can be an effective way to spread awareness of your campaign without ‘hitting up’ everyone individually. So consider downloading a Team Azalea Charities, AWW flyer you can customize with your name and contact information, then print at home or at a place like Office Depot or Kinkos.
Mail a Traditional Fundraising Letter
It may not be practical or advisable to use email to solicit donations from some of your prospective supporters and business or corporate sponsors who would more traditionally respond favorably to personal letter from you. So we’ve provided you a sample letter you can download and personalize to your desire. We also suggest you attach our downloadable Team Azalea Charities donation form to attach to your letter.
We've provided a sample downloadable TAC, RWW fundraising letter you can customize with your name and contact info. Here's a sample memo you can download and personalize to meet your needs.
Active Giving Help
Visit Active Giving Help to download instructions if you need help customizing your web page, posting offline check donations, or to get more fundraising tips. If you are having any issues with your individual fundraising page, you can email Active Giving’s customer support at GivingSupport@active.com or call a representative at 1-877-228-4881 / Option 2.
We will provide other fundraising strategies, ideas, and have resources at your disposal once you sign up to join Team Azalea Charities. Though we’re already supporting servicemen and women at hospitals like Walter Reed, Bethesda, Malcolm Grow, Landstuhl, Balad, and over 12 other medical centers across the country, our goal is to grow our fundraising base so we can eventually support service personnel and veterans visiting medical facilities across the globe.
Seeking Matching donations from your Employer
Please investigate whether your company has a ‘matching donations’ program, since this provides you an opportunity to double your contributions from anyone who makes donations from your company. We also suggest you ask your donors if their company does matching donations. The requisite tax deductible 503(3)(c) documentation from the IRS will need to be forwarded to these donors for their company records.
Saying Thank You
Rest assured all your donors will receive a confirmation email or thank you memo when they make a donation. For credit card donations made on your fundraising page, active auto-generates an email to your donors briefly confirming their donation and thanking them for their generosity. For donations received by check, Azalea Charities will send a confirmation and thank you memo directly to your donors by mail. If you wish to also send a memo to your donors, feel free to download our sample thank you memo which you can customize to meet your needs."
Info on How Donations are Used
Your sponsors will likely want to know how their donations are being used. We encourage you to visit or point your donors to the Azalea Charities, Inc. website at www.aidforwoundedsoldiers.org to view accounts on how we are helping combat wounded soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as helping veterans from previous wars. We are committed to remember our heroes long after they disappear from the headlines.