A few misc. things that worked, and didn't...

There were a few smaller fundraising ideas that we tried.  Some worked...  some didn't...

One of those things that did work:  One of my teammates had a friend that sold Tastefully Simple.  She was extremely generous, and agreed to give us a large portion of her open house sales.  She was absolutely wonderful!  She and my teammate did all the prep for the open house day (thanks Lisa!), and everything we tried was delicious!  Sadly, I was only able to sell to my mother-in-law and one of my sister-in-laws, and I of course purchased something.  I felt really bad, especially when both my teammates seemed to have sold a lot of her products.  I am not sure why no one I asked wanted anything; this didn't go well for me personally.  But my 2 teammates sold like crazy, and even though I barely contributed anything, they graciously allowed me to split the donation money with them.  We raised $50 each from this!  Overall a success story!

Another idea we had was to sell candles, right around Mother's Day.  This one did not work for us, and we sold NO candles in 3 weeks!  We tried this one online, so that it wasn't an extreme amount of work (since we were planning for our first bake sale and selling bracelets at the same time).  I really don't know why (like my attempt at selling Tastefully Simple) this didn't work, because when I read things from the 3 Day message boards this idea seemed to work very well for other people.

 Here was a good one - along with my pink hair challenge, I had a firefighter that worked with my husband offer an insane amount of donation money to dye ALL my hair pink!  He offered me $250 to do it!  How could I say no?  So I looked online for some pink hair dye again, and wrote to the company that had previously donated the hair dye for my streaks, Streakers.  They told me they don't sell that kind of hair dye, and pointed me in the right direction to a  couple of companies that did.  So once again I emailed the 2 companies I had found to see if they would be willing to donate the hair dye.  This time though I had no luck.  Oh well!  But of course I ran into the same issue as with my pink hair streaks; my employer would not allow me to come to work with pink hair.  I looked for a type of dye that would wash out after 3-5 times, but it does not exist (that I found anyway).  My choices were then either the pink hair spray, or a type of dye that washed out somewhere between 10-30 washings.  Well as much as I would have loved to try the latter, I figured my luck would have been that it took 30 washings.  I couldn't take off of work for a month (wouldn't that have been nice) so I had to go with the pink hair spray.  What a mess!!!  My hair was definitely neon pink and stiff as a board!  LOL!  So after I sprayed it all off I went to visit my husband's friend at the firehouse.  And true to his word, he gave me a $250 donation, and another firefighter donated $20 as well.  They were wonderful!

And one last idea that worked for another woman quite well but didn't go quite as successfully for me was a facebook challenge.  I got the idea from another walker on the 3 Day message boards.  I modified it a little bit so it wasn't EXACTLY the same, but it was the same idea.  It was my $3, 30 day for my 3 Day question-a-day challenge.  The plan was to ask one question everyday for a month to which if someone answered yes, they "owed" a $3 donation.  I was hoping to get people who I knew didn't have a lot of money to donate involved, by giving them a way to give only a small amount of money without feeling embarrassed or guilty about it.  It was a minimal amount of work, and it was a fun challenge for me to come up with 30 questions related to the 3 Day for the Cure, or the color pink, or relating to me in some way.  It didn't raise a lot of money towards a cure, but for the minimal amount of work it took I think I may attempt it again this year...

I am glad I tried all of these ideas out, because this time around I will spend more time doing what worked, trying completely different ideas that I didn't have a chance to do last year, and discarding the ideas that really didn't go too well. I hope I was able to help someone out there with their fundraising, too.  I feel very blessed that I was able to raise over $2,800 in 2010 towards a world without breast cancer.  Hopefully this year will be a wonderful success for me and for the Susan G. Komen Foundation again!