Ø Wine tasting event - Have everyone pay a cover charge to come and sip different wines and cheeses. Ask the facility if they do “custom labels” If so, consider taking orders for EDNF custom label wines. They would make great holiday gifts.

Ø Ask a store to contribute a gift certificate to use for the wine.

Ø Happy hour - Ask a local bar to charge a cover on a particular night and the proceeds go to you, or offer a percentage of the total sales to EDNF.

Ø Tip/Donations Jars - Set up buckets at local restaurants and stores with the EDNF logo. A picture is often helpful. In Texas, they have allowed this at places such as: Smoothie King, Tom Thumb Grocery, Wal-Mart.) Check in with them weekly.

Ø Car wash - Gather friends to volunteer their assistance. This is a good opportunity to get a community or school group together for a good cause. A high school leadership group, etc. are always looking for volunteer service hours and they could help at the garage sale. Don't forget to display printed information about EDS. Ask if you can sell water bottles during the garage sale. You can get cases very cheap at Sam's and you just need coolers and ice. Remember to put out "tip jars” as many people are willing to give you a donation without even having their car washed.

Ø T-Shirt Sales

Ø Spaghetti Dinner ($15 tickets with donated goods)

Ø Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Delivery - - Krispy Kreme offers cards that you buy for $5, sell for $10 and it gives the person a free dozen for a dozen purchased. Many teenagers in my area use these Krispy Kreme cards to raise money for mission trips and such.

Ø Pump Gas - Ask a gas station if they will let you pump gas and ask for tips for a day.

Ø Silent auction - Collect donated items for the auction.

Ø Bachelor auction - Gather up your boys and ask a bar to donate their space for an evening. Some have had great success with this!

Ø Progressive dinner - Each of your friends host a course and your guests pay $15-$20 to participate.

Ø Ask a church group or other social club for donations.

Ø Garage Sale - Gather items for a garage sale from neighbors and friends. Advertise all over the Metroplex. Sell ice cold water bottles for shoppers. Don't forget a donation jar so that people can make a contribution during the garage sale for EDNF.

Ø We solicited people we knew to make donations of items to sell in our garage sale. You can put up flyers at your place of business, church, neighborhood, etc. Many people do not want to hassle with their own garage sale and are more than willing to donate their "junk". We highly recommend a pick-up service (YOU are the pickup service!!!). We raised over $1,500 for our garage sale. This was cash, and we were lucky to have a matching Grants company that doubled our money. Special Note: Check on required permits in your city!

Ø Basketball/softball/volleyball tournament - Find a free ball field and host an all day tournament.

Ø Golf round robin.

Ø Raffle local professional sporting team tickets or invite friends and up the price of the ticket. The Texas Ranger organization allows non-profits to purchase tickets for designated games at ½ price so that the organization can sell them full price and keep the profits. You can do well if you go to your church, synagogue or schools looking for large groups.

Ø Ask school age children to sponsor a child diagnosed with EDS. Have the class bring spare change to raise money for you. Give the class with the most money raised a pizza party.

Ø Corporate Matching - ALWAYS look for people that will help you match funds.

Ø Recipe Book - Collect recipes and make a book, sell them in local stores, churches, social clubs, etc.

Ø Casino party - Get a casino kit and charge individuals $1 a chip to play. Get donations for prizes. Rent a room or use a big house to throw the party. This might be fun in neighborhoods that have a central meeting room or clubhouse as a community event.

Ø Be a guest server at a restaurant or bar.

Ø Sonic - car hop on a Sat. afternoon (w/ a small group of 8-10) and get all tips! Ask the manager if your local Sonic will participate. In Texas, the Sonic stores are always willing to let groups do this and the least we have made is $700. If you have animated workers who are willing to "sing for tips"or dance for tips¦ being cute & funny ... we have made as much as $1200.

Ø Wal-Mart - Ask for donations at your local Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart management has the discretion to match donations that you raise. You must make arrangements with the management prior to your fundraising, and it is management's choice to match donations. Wal-mart local management has a fund for this and give $1000 grants. Timing is very important so if you write a request and take it into your Wal-Mart and they don't have funds please ask them if there is a better time of year to get on the radar screen.

Ø Jeans/Casual Day - If your office is business formal or business casual, arrange to allow co-workers and employees to wear jeans for one day if they donate $5 to EDNF. You can go one step further with larger companies and ask the company if they would match, dollar for dollar, the amount of money collected from employees for jeans day.

Ø Candy/Food sales - Various candy companies will let you keep a % of profit to use toward your fundraising goal.

Ø Pampered Chef Party - Gather your friends or acquaintances that like to cook or prepare food. Similar to a Tupperware party.

Ø Host a Superbowl party - Instead of the usual betting squares, sell betting squares such that a 50% of the money goes into the pot and the other 50% goes towards your fundraising goal.

Ø Golden Globes & Oscar Parties - same concept as the Superbowl party, but put together a sheet of all the nominees for all categories and get everyone to select who they think will win. The person with the most correct entries wins the pot.

Ø Extra Change in my Pocket - Create little boxes for your friends and family and have them place it on their dresser. At the end of the day they can drop that spare change in the box. Before your deadline, you can gather the boxes and add the money to your fundraising.

Ø Answering Machine Message - This will let everyone who calls you at home know that you are up to something special! Let them know that you need their support.

Ø Hair Salon - Ask your barber or hairdresser to donate $1.00 of every haircut they complete over one weekend or set up a tip jar for TNT.

Ø Mow-A-Thon - Get your kids involved in this weekend activity. Check ahead of time with all your neighbors and ask them if you can mow their lawn for $25.00.

Ø Baby-sitting - Offer up your services and let your friends have a nice, quiet night out of the house.

Ø Pet sit - Offer up your services and charge them what they would have had to pay at the facility.

Ø Neighborhood Chores - A lot of your neighbors would probably rather pay you than someone else. Place signs around your neighborhood advertising your services (watering gardens, cleaning roof gutters, painting, oil changes, etc.)

Ø E-Bay.com - Remember the garage sale idea? How about rounding up the goods from your friends and putting it all in Ebay.com to be auctioned off?

Ø Curse jar - Place a curse jar in your office and whenever someone says a bad word they have to open their wallet, grab a dollar and put it in the jar.

Ø Find a school (or schools) in your area that will allow you to place fundraising jars in each homeroom class. It helps if you know someone at the school or your child attends the school. Many schools have organizations that require service projects (i.e., student council, National Honor Society). Make it a competition between classes or grade levels to see who can raise the most money per student. The reward we gave was a pizza party to the class in each grade level. We had our pizza donated by Pizza Hut. We had the Student Council members go to each homeroom and share the cancer facts. Then, the students had two weeks to collect money. We did it by grade level and sent "challenge letters" to the other classes. It raised over $7,400 at one local school. Your best contact is a teacher you know at the school.

Ø SQUARES FOR EDS. This is a football pot. You make a grid with 100 squares and people buy squares. On each side, you label the team name. Once the squares are filled with people's names, you draw numbers 0-9 for each side of the pot. Drawing the numbers after the squares are full makes it fairest for everyone. At the end of each quarter, you look at the last number in each score. The person on that box wins! We charged $10 each square. We paid $125 a quarter, and made $500 for fundraising.

 Raffles and such ...

Ø You can visit businesses and ask for donations that you can then use to create a raffle basket. Many places are much more willing to donate services than money. Then you can raffle the products. Some examples would be tanning salons, beauty salons, lube and tire stores, restaurants (larger chains require more work), and nail salons.

Ø One VERY successful raffle idea that I have done - I went around to local restaurants (and in Plano, Texas, there are HUNDREDS!!) and asked if they would be willing to donate a restaurant gift certificate. At first I thought I would try to get 12, but the restaurants were SO willing to donate that I changed my goal to 52. I got 52 donations - some of them were pizza places that donated 3 certificates for one large pizza each - but I put together a basket with the theme "Dinner out each week for a YEAR!!!" I printed tickets and sold the tickets $10 each or 3 for $25. In just that one fundraiser I earned $4,000.

The KEY with any kind of successful fundraising is to get community involvement. If you do things only within your local groups you are not tapping into the community and so many people are willing to donate to a good cause. In the case of something like the "dinner out weekly for a year" raffle basket really think about ways to sell the tickets. You can offer tickets to other local groups and allow them to keep 50% of what they sell. You can see if you can get permission to set up a table outside a Blockbuster Video, Grocery, Wal-Mart (Target does NOT allow it) etc - and sell tickets to the public. You can send an email to EVERYONE in your address book telling them what you are doing and why and ask them if they would like to purchase tickets. You can go door to door in your neighborhood - just think BIG!!!