Forget dress-down Fridays, it’s time for Fundraising Fridays
Raising money for charity at work can be a great way to collect funds for a good cause and bring you and your work colleagues closer together. But instead of going for the more common and less original office fundraising ideas like a sponsored sporting event or cake sale, why not choose something that’s a little bit more out there? As innovators ourselves, we are all for wacky fundraising ideas to make raising money for charity good fun for all involved. We’ve put together some unique charity fundraising ideas for work below to get you started. If they are a big hit, why not consider making them a permanent feature of the workweek, swapping dress-down Fridays into Fundraising Fridays!
Lunch and Learn
Make your work lunchbreaks more productive and interesting by setting up weekly or monthly Lunch and Learn session. These are voluntary training sessions or seminars that give co-workers the chance to learn new skills and take advantage of each other’s expertise. It could be a course set up over several weeks or multiple one-off sessions. They can be on professional skills which are useful to your business and team such as basic coding, or on a personal hobby like samurai sword collecting or rock balancing. To turn these sessions into a charity fundraising idea at work, charge attendees admission for coming to the events. As it’s at lunchtime and stomachs will be rumbling, remember that food will need to be provided! If you have a food table set up, why not place one of our countertop GBx Core on the table to encourage attendees to donate with a tap of their card or mobile while piling up their plates with cocktail sausages and mini cupcakes.
Office X-Factor
Do you have one work colleague who can’t keep singing along to the office playlist? Or the musical belter who knows the words to every song at the Christmas party? Make the most out of your team’s musical (or lack of) talent with an X-factor style sing-off (or alternatively karaoke)! You can split you and your colleagues into categories according to age, gender, singing style, or add a more competitive element by organising groups according to different departments.
Each contestant needs to pay a registration fee of, say £5, while the attendees can pay for admission tickets. You can also have donation points set up during the event using our contactless donation device the GBx Core to raise additional funds. Often, people will give more than the cost of the ticket if you provide them with an easy way to donate without the need for finding loose change.
Interdepartmental sports day
Remember taking part in your school’s sports day every summer? Your competitive edge coming out as you skillfully balance a precariously positioned egg on a spoon while trying to outrun your classmates? There’s nothing like competitive sport to bring out the kids in all of us, and your office is no different. Raise funds for a charity of your choice by competing with your colleagues in the classic sports day events like egg and spoon race, three-legged race and the sack race.
Teams or individuals can pay a fee to enter into the competition, while additional funds can be raised through supplying food and drinks. If you don’t have access to an outdoor space (or the British weather is less than ideal) why not adjust the sports for more office-appropriate events. Think desk table tennis, stapling races, office chair relays and desk hurdles. Be imaginative! Our affordable and lightweight GBx Mini allows you to collect contactless donations on the go, so you can raise additional donations from wherever you are during your sports day event.
Cook-ups
Bring the love of food into the office by enlisting the help of your best amateur chefs and self-proclaimed foodies. All you have to do is create a list of willing volunteers to bring in dishes for everyone to try. You can stick to a particular dish type to see what variations everyone can bring to the table, such as chilli or curry night. Or bring some multiculturalism to the office by assigning each participant a particular dish or cuisine from around the world to make; these can be their go-to dishes, secret family recipes or an opportunity for them to try something new. You can charge admission, or charge the participants per serving as well as raising additional sums through selling the recipes for each dish.
If your office is full of foodies as opposed to at-home cooks, enlist the help of some local restaurants and street food vendors instead. Get a permit and local food trucks to park in a parking lot and create an after-hours foodie’s heaven. Don’t forget to find a few microbrewers and gin distilleries to provide the drinks to wash the food down with! You can raise funds by charging the attendees entrance fees, and some of the vendors might be willing to donate some of their profits to the cause as well. Set up donation points at each food truck with our GBx Core to make it easy for attendees to donate additional funds without the need to carry around charity collection buckets!
Office pub quiz night
It’s undeniable that fundraising and trivia go hand in hand. If your team has a local pub that they frequent most weeks, then why not ask if you can arrange your own pub quiz? You can either create the questions yourself or find examples online, but make sure you have a mixture of topics to give everyone a chance to take part. Then all you have to do is spread the word! Set a number limit per team and charge each team a fee for signing up. You can also see if the pub is willing to donate some of their profits from the night too, which they may be happy to do if you bring a big enough crowd.
Raffle a day off work
Raffles are a time-honoured office fundraising idea, but instead of offering an Amazon gift card as the reward why not set a day off work as the prize? This is a great way to reward your employees for their hard work and boost company morale while raising money for charity at the same time. They will certainly be motivated to take part! Start collecting tickets over a number of days then reveal the winner at the end of the week.
Job swap
Job swapping is when two employees, preferably in different departments, ‘swap’ jobs for a certain period of time. There are various job swap schemes out there, but not all are used as a charity fundraising idea at work, although there is plenty of reason to do so! Take inspiration from Fazenda in Manchester, a restaurant whose front-of-house and kitchen staff swapped roles for their ‘Social Sunday’, managing to raise £18,000 for charity in doing so.
Beyond raising money for charity, job swaps can be incredibly useful for your business. When not used as a fundraising idea for work, it’s also used as a method of cross-training as it increases employees’ understanding of how other departments operate. This not only helps with cross-collaboration across teams, but also allows you as an employer know which employees can cover other positions, who might be better suited for other roles, or who might be ready for more responsibility.
Fancy dress
Raising money for charity is a great excuse for digging out your dust-covered Halloween costume from a few years back. Whether it’s for annual charity days such as Red Nose Day or the International Day Of Charity, get you and your work colleagues to dress up in their chosen costume for the day. You can set an overall theme for the day, like book or film characters, or let people’s imagination run wild and see what they come up with. Just like with school fancy dress days, ensure that everyone who participates brings in their designated donation to be given to your cause. To make things interesting, why not allow your colleagues to vote on what their managers and team leaders can wear? They can pay a fee to vote, and whichever outfit receives the most amount of votes will be chosen!
Treasure hunt
Set up an office scavenger hunt to get you and your co-workers racing around the office all in the name of charity (and everyone’s competitive streaks). Simply come up with a list of clues for different teams to follow (the longer and harder the better) that match objects hidden around the office.
Once the course is set, it’s time for colleagues to band together into teams of 4-5, give them the first clue and let them go treasure hunting! To make things more interesting, create additional bonus point activities to be completed in between finding the clues, like taking a picture of the whole team doing yoga poses. For each collected item and additional activities completed the teams will be awarded points, which can be added up at the end to determine the winner.
Make the most out of your office fundraising with GoodBox
There are often two motivations behind choosing an office fundraising idea – raising money for charity, and having some fun with your co-workers. The latter is easy to achieve if you choose wacky and interactive idea that gets everyone involved. But the former can be harder to do. Often, charity fundraising ideas at work aren’t as effective as they could be because the organisers rely on their co-workers having loose change. Although we would never discourage offices for dressing up and playing desk table tennis for a charitable cause (or just to brighten up your Fridays), to make a real impact with your donations you need to collect funds in the most effective way.
Whether it’s using our portable GBx Mini, countertop GBx Core or a mixture of our devices, our custom-built tech has helped hundreds of organisations make the most out of their fundraising ideas. By using our contactless donation technology, our clients have seen their fund collections increase by as much as 64%. You can have the same impact with your office fundraising idea, turning your Fundraising Friday into a huge success that helps to bring about real change to those in need.
To find out more about renting one of our devices for your work fundraising idea, or for expert advice on organising an office fundraiser, get in touch with our insightful team today.
