Member solicitation

A service club's fundraising advantage is not its mailing list — it is that its members have known the town's business owners personally for decades. A member asking a hardware store they have used since 1994 is a different transaction entirely from a letter.

The problem is that this knowledge lives in individual heads, disappears when somebody stops attending, and produces the same four businesses being asked six times.

Run it from one list

• Write down every business anybody in the club has a relationship with, and who has it
• Assign each to exactly one member, in writing
• Record the outcome: donated, declined, no reply, ask later
• Nobody asks outside their assignment, including the president
• Keep the list for next year, and for the year after the member retires

That last point is the durable value. A club that writes down its relationships has created an asset that survives its members; one that does not loses thirty years of contacts when somebody stops driving at night.

Ask the members what they know, not what they will give

The productive question at a club meeting is not "who will get donations?" but "whose brother-in-law owns something, who does your family bank with, who did your roof, who is on your street?"

Twenty minutes of that at one meeting produces a better prospect list than any amount of committee work, and it includes businesses nobody would have thought to approach.

Members donate first

A member soliciting a business that knows the member has not contributed is a weak ask, and in a small town people know.

Get the club's own contributions in before anybody goes out — services, goods, hosting, professional time. A club roster of retired professionals is a catalogue on its own.

Give them the language

Half a page every member carries:

• What the club funded last year, with figures
• That members pay the club's own costs, so public donations go to service
• What this auction funds, specifically, and what one unit costs
• That nothing identifying may be said about anybody the club has helped
• Whether donations are tax deductible — accurately, which requires knowing the club's own status

The deductibility line matters. A member who assures a business that a donation is deductible when the club is not a qualifying charity has made a small problem for somebody who trusted them.

Work the club's own suppliers

The club buys things — the meeting venue, the caterer, the printer, the insurance, the pancake supplies, the trophies. Those businesses have a commercial relationship with the club and are frequently never asked to donate.

And ask the other clubs

The Rotary, Kiwanis and Optimist clubs in the same town are not competitors in any way that matters. They will donate items, promote the auction and attend, and they expect the same in return.

Several clubs each donating to the others' auctions costs nobody anything and improves every catalogue in town.

General information, not legal or tax advice for your club. Account separation rules, charitable status and the use of the association's name and emblem come from your own constitution and your district — check both before fundraising.