Deployment support funds

Unit-level fundraising is a different activity from national military charity, and it is the version most people in this space are actually doing: a family readiness or support group raising a modest amount for a specific unit's people over a specific deployment.

It also carries none of the category's trust problem, because everybody giving knows the people they are giving for.

Check your own rules first

Family readiness and support groups operate under service-specific rules on what they may raise, how funds are held, what they may be spent on, and who signs. These are more specific than most volunteers expect and they exist because the money belongs to families rather than to whoever is running the group this year.

• What the group is permitted to fundraise for
• Where the funds are held and who has signature authority
• What records and reporting are required
• Whether the group may accept corporate donations, and from whom
• What happens to funds when the group's leadership changes or the unit moves

Ask the family programmes office. This is routine work for them and getting it right protects the volunteers running the group more than anybody else.

What these funds actually cover

• Care packages for deployed members, including for those with no family sending them
• Homecoming events and welcome-home decorations
• Emergency assistance for a family during deployment — a car repair, a bill, childcare
• Family events during a deployment, which are the main morale investment
• A memorial or a hospitality fund when something goes wrong
• Farewell gifts and unit recognition, within the rules

The care packages for members with nobody sending them are worth naming explicitly. It is a real gap, it is quietly understood in the unit, and it is a specific and affecting thing for a donor to fund without anybody being identified.

Keep it small and quick

Twenty items, a two-week window, run online so that geographically scattered families and extended relatives can take part. A unit's fundraising audience is spread across the country — parents, siblings, in-laws — and an online auction reaches them where a bake sale on post does not.

The extended family is the audience

This is the practical insight for a unit group. Each service member has parents, grandparents and relatives who want to do something for the unit and have no way to. Ask each family to forward the auction to five people and the reach multiplies immediately.

Protect the families

• Never publish which families are receiving assistance
• Do not publish deployment details, locations, dates or unit movements
• Be careful with photographs, which can carry more information than intended
• Do not identify who has nobody sending them a package
• Treat anonymity as the default in a small community where everybody knows everybody

And hand it over cleanly

Unit groups turn over constantly as people rotate. Write down what was raised, where it is held, what it was spent on and who signs — and hand that to the next volunteer rather than leaving them to reconstruct it.

General information, not legal advice for your organization. Rules on fundraising at installations, soliciting service members, and the use of unit names, insignia and service marks come from DoD and service regulation and from the installation itself — ask the installation and your own counsel before acting.