Equipment fundraising ideas

[drsound]

You could do something like a Battle of the Bands - cheesy and old hat to most people but they can be surprisingly good. See "T in the Pub" in Glasgow for an example - the winner plays at "T in the Park". If you're willing to put in the effort, and trust me it'll be you doing most of it, you can get a few entries from your school and possibly a few from other schools. You can charge the entries a nominal fee (£10) and then give prizes (of either cash or perhaps sponsored gifts of musical equipment if your school will not allow cash prizes) while keeping back a sum, 50% is usually good, to put toward the fund raising efforts. The real money making comes from charging people to come and watch. Not only will you get interest from your own school but the other bands will bring their mates.

 

The problem you will encounter is as cedd says - you will struggle to put on a decent event without the equipment in place. However, it's worth trying the following...

 

You approach a local hire company and offer them a deal. You will guarantee to spend whatever money is raised from the event with them (helpful if you can guarantee a minimum here as you will need to place a formal PO with them) and see if they are willing to partially offset the cost of a hire against this. They also get title sopnsorship of the event.

 

For example, if you intend to spend £2,500 with a company and they will hire you a rig for £300 at their normal school rate then perhaps you could offer them a contract to buy the kit for a wee bit extra, say £2600 and as much sponsorship exposure as you can. In return they give you a hire for free. Bear in mind you will have to raise a formal purchase order for the gear first as they'll need this to justify a cheap hire. Ajust these figures to suit your situation.

 

We do this frequently for clients who want a system immediately but don't have the cash. They get a rig in immediately, we're guaranteed the install work and we get something back for the short or long term hire of a system. On a more commercial note this also allows them to push items like equipment hire onto their capex budget from overhead (or P&L depending on your terminology). Capitalising as much cost as possible is generally good, particularly for high cashflow/low fixed asset businesses like a lot of venues. It allows them to use their finance provider of choice to spread the cost of the purchase and to work out a favourable tax treatment with their accountant.

 

Just remember that not all companies work on this basis and you might have to do a bit of phoning around and persuading to get them to agree to the plan. You will also have to find something to offer them that is worth the "missing" revenue from the cheap hire. We have lots of requests every months from people wanting free/very cheap hire for events where they offer sopnsorship. This isn't worth doing since we must, at a minimum, cover costs. We would expect to recover our out of pocket costs on the job (hence the £100 in my example) with profit (contribution in accounting terms) from future sales/goodwill/payment in kind/sponsorship.

 

Feel free to PM me if you need any more info, we'll be glad to help. Also if you're in our area (London/Oxfordshire/Berkshire/Hampshire) give us a buzz and we'll see what we can do.

[tecky_man]

Hi there

 

Not sure how or if you can apply for money as your a schooll, but our local council have a group that give 'left over' money away every so often to various groups if you apply for it. I know local scout groups that applied for money for new boats, and our youth group got £500 for lighting kit from them.

Its worth ringing the council to see if they have any grants/scheme's like this, all it involved us doing was to write a list of what we wanted and why, go and present it to their panel, who then think about it and say either yes or no.

You have to say how you will use the equipment and how it will benefit you etc, and then evaluate after and prove its worth to them.

 

Its gotta be worth a phone call to see if they'd let you apply for money for specific sound equipment for your school, if you worded it like ' I would love to see more happening with after school events (gigs, drama's etc), if we had more kit..... '

 

 

Hope thats of some help.

 

James

[Ben Langfeld]

James,

 

I have offered Sean help with sourcing grant funding. As yet, I've not heard much back. Perhaps he will come back to TBR at some point in the future...