Animal Welfare Professionals

Hi Everyone, 

I want to change our big annual fundraiser to a bar crawl of sorts. Our organization typically does a huge wine tasting event where we invite a bunch of wineries to our shop to host tastings. It can be a lot of work having everyone come to us and I wanted to switch things up this year. We already have an area scoped out and they're willing to work with us. Since it's the first time either of us have done an event like this, I was hoping for so advice. How do you organize events like this? Does the bar provide discount drinks/food as a donation? Any logisitical help would be appreciated. 

Thanks! 

I recently attended the pup crawl organized by the Humane Society of Central Oregon and I really enjoyed the way the event was set up. They partnered with 9 local breweries to host the pup crawl on different days spread out between Feb. 6-23. At each location, they had a table set up and supporters could buy commemorative pup crawl pint glasses & drink tickets good for beer, wine or soda. The humane society received 100% of the money earned from the $5 drink tickets as a donation from the brewery. Most breweries only had 1 or 2 drinks the ticket did not apply to.

There were some breweries that had an outdoor section which allowed for dogs & their owners to mingle which were the best days along the pup crawl as volunteers were able to bring some of the dogs from the shelter. Some breweries were indoor only, didn't allow animals and didn't have a designated area so it felt much more separated. 

I spoke to the organizer and she said they approached several breweries throughout the community asking if they would like to be a sponsor of the pup crawl. All that was needed at their location was a table near the entrance to sell the glasses & drink tickets. In exchange, the humane society would market the event to their audience, bringing in business to the establishment.

Hopefully that helps get some ideas going for your pup crawl!

I've put together a bunch of these types of events, and we usually end up settling on a venue that has the best combination of a central location, fun ambience, staff who want to work with the organization, the venue gets a lot of foot traffic on its own, and most importantly: will give some type of donation (recently we did one that gave us $1 for every beer sold; some may give a % of proceeds), and will allow us to fundraise in other ways (as in, having a raffle, bake sale, silent auction, will let us bring in a food truck that also will donate a % of proceeds to us, etc.). The largest portion of fundraising revenue that we've generated at every one of the events I've been involved with has always come from a concurrent silent auction. People really like them, and once you know of some good places to look it doesn't take too, too much time. I'm attaching a fundraising guide from an organization I was involved with about 10 years ago-- it might be a bit outdated but the forms and things are still relevant. I have more stuff I will email you, from my time with the Friends of the Fairfax County Animal Shelter.

Attachment(s)

Fundraising Guide - Teaching HOPE.docx   83 KB 1 version