Charity night formats

For most lodges the fundraising question and the visibility question are the same question. The community does not know what the lodge does because it has never been inside, and it has never been inside because nothing has invited it.

Formats

Online, closing at an open evening in the hall. The strongest default. Bidding reaches people who will not attend, the evening supplies a deadline, and the building gets its visitors.

Attached to something the hall already hosts. A pancake breakfast, a fish fry, a community dinner, a blood drive, a scout event. The audience is already coming and the lodge is already staffing it.

Online only. Right for a lodge whose active membership cannot staff an evening, which is more of them than will admit it.

Alongside a hall rental. Where a community group has booked the hall and agrees, a display and a QR code reach an audience that is already there for something else.

Open the building deliberately

If people are coming, let them see something.

• A short tour of the parts of the building that are open to visitors — agreed with the lodge's leadership in advance
• The history on the walls, which in an old lodge is genuinely interesting
• A display of what the lodge funded last year, with photographs and figures
• Members present and willing to talk about the charitable work
• And a clear, unembarrassed answer to "what do you actually do?"

That last one is worth rehearsing. Members frequently answer it awkwardly because the honest answer involves things they are not supposed to describe — so agree in advance what everybody says, and lead with the charitable work rather than the ritual.

Do not make it a recruitment pitch

The temptation, given a room full of visitors and a declining membership, is to make the evening about joining. It reads badly, it makes the charity look like a pretext, and it does not work.

Run a good evening, publish what the lodge funds, and let people ask. Some will — and those are better prospects than anybody who was pitched.

Invite the hall's own communities

The scouts who meet on Tuesdays, the recovery group, the pantry volunteers, the quilters, the blood drive donors. They are already inside the building weekly and have no idea the lodge funds anything.

Invite them specifically and by name, and ask their leaders to share it. It is the warmest audience the lodge has and the least used.

Publish the numbers afterwards

What was raised, what it funds, and — the part lodges omit — what the lodge gave last year in total. Put it in the local paper, on the noticeboard and on the sign outside.

A lodge that does this once a year for three years has changed what the town thinks the building is, which is worth more than any single auction.

General information, not legal or tax advice for your lodge. Whether contributions are deductible depends on your exemption classification and on the purpose the funds are used for — this is exactly the situation to put in front of your own adviser and your grand lodge before telling anybody anything.