When you think of talking to people about fund raising, it’s hard not to think of your kids making noise and getting in the way of getting your message out. It’s very easy to think that you would do much better in your fund raising on your own, but you should really take a second and think about getting them involved. It’s for your own good, and theirs, that you get them involved when you try to do your fund raising for the 3-Day for the Cure, or for that matter any charity work.
As I mentioned in an earlier item, I have been doing a lot of door to door fund raising this year. When I started out, I wasn’t sure about taking the kids, but I had an unavoidable event that caused me to have to take my 4-year old son with me on the first outing that I did. I cringed a little bit at my prospects, I even thought that having him in tow might cause me to have to cut my expedition short, but soon I found that all of my fears were unfounded.
Sawyer was actually excited about going. He pointed out houses that we needed to visit and made sure to ring the doorbell at every house. I think he had an idea of why we were going to all these houses and he was extremely well behaved. In fact, when it came time that we had to go pick up my wife, he still wanted to go to more houses. He kept saying, “Let’s go to the next house daddy!” Talk about keeping someone motivated to keep at it!
The next weekend I was going out again and my wife suggested that I take both of the boys with me. I wasn’t sure about having both children in tow at once but I still went and it worked out just as well. I started giving away thank you gifts that week to anyone that donated and Jackson (he’s 8) asked if he could have the job of handing out the gifts. It worked out well, they both had a job that they enjoyed doing! As we walked, we came to one of Jackson’s friends’ houses. They then asked if they could go along with us to. So here I was going door to door with FOUR kids when the week before I wasn’t even sure about one! They all gave themselves individual jobs.
With all this going on, I didn’t notice a few really neat things. First, as I went to people’s doors they definitely took notice of me and listened to what I had to say. I’m sure that they wanted to know why I had four kids with me, but the fact that it caused them to listen to my message which was great. I was spreading breast cancer awareness of children!
The second thing that I noticed needs a little background. Being a man going door to door, there are definitely some houses that people just don’t want to open the door to you. When I had children with me, there was not one door that stayed closed if someone was home. In fact, it made people a lot more conversational. They all wanted to know about the four kids that were all within four years of each others age!
The last thing that I noticed was that getting them involved actually did get them involved. Jackson started to ask when I was going to go out next to raise money for breast cancer. All the kids wanted to keep going when I was ready to stop and it really seemed like they wanted to do this good thing. The next time I went out the neighbors saw us on the street and asked if they could come along again. It was really cool to see.
So involve the kids in your fund raising activities, it’s highly likely that they will help out and it’s also really likely that they will pick up something from doing such a fantastic thing for other people. Want some other evidence of how kids helped out with fund raising? Check out Beckie at Ta Ta Sisterhood’s post about her recent fund raising events, one that she had the kids help with! Also, in my fund raising video that I sent out last week, I had the kids read the names of people that had donated as a way to say thank you. It went over really well!
