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Getting Help from Your Nominated Charity
Many Garden Owners elect to choose a charity to receive 60% of the open day takings. Often these charities help, for example by managing the teas. But charities can offer more help, especially in terms of promotion. This article includes suggestions from one of our charities linked to a Glasgow & District garden. We also prepared a Charity Pack with tips how to promote and templates created with charities in mind: CHARITY PACK
Generally speaking, ask your elected charities to:
Help with the teas. Many charities completely handle the teas, from baking, cups & saucers and serving. But do remember to have the money taken for teas included in the day’s takings and passed to your district treasurer to disperse to the designated charity. Almost always, 60% of the day is higher than the tea takings and thus more beneficial to the charity.
Promote your upcoming: distribute your posters, mention your opening in their newsletters, promote in their social media (eg: Facebook and Twitter), and put out press releases.
Send out a press release after the opening to tell the world how much was raised.
The following has been provided by Elspeth Campbell, Fundraising Manager, Jewish Care Scotland
As you may be aware, Jewish Care Scotland is a fairly unique organisation in that it is very community centred both in terms of the clients we support and also our volunteers. So when Laura Harrison from Kamares suggested opening her garden last year and asked if we would be able to help we were delighted to do so. We have a group of volunteer bakers and got a very positive response when we asked for baking contributions for the strawberry teas and other volunteers were willing to come and help on the day.
I know that a lot of your garden owners maybe don’t have such a direct connection with the charity they choose but I would encourage them to approach the charity (a lot have dedicated volunteer managers etc) to ask if there would be any support available from local volunteers and also if they could promote the opening to their supporters through their newsletters, mailings, websites, social media channels etc. This can only have a beneficial effect on attendance and therefore income for everyone on the day. One downside might be a charity with multiple openings may struggle to find volunteers willing to support them all.
You already have information on each garden on your website and I am not ashamed to say I used this to promote it through our website etc.! Certainly as far as JCS is concerned it also gave us the opportunity to raise awareness of the work we do as well as be a presence on the day – I think this has more impact coming from the charity. Our volunteers enjoyed it as it was something different from our usual events and was a very social occasion.
Please note, if your charity is not in a position to help you with your teas, you might contact Hazel in the office to see if we can get one of our beneficiaries to help.
