We live and breathe grassroots sport. We play it, we love it, we service it.
We know how tight it can be for clubs up and down the country, which is why we’ve put together a list of ideas that can help you raise all important cash for those pitch fees, referee costs, summer tours, kit and more.
Smarties Tubes
Run a youth team? Try this one with all of your players. Provide each player with a big smarties tube (sweets included of course), give them 2-4 weeks to fill the tube back up with 20p’s. Head to high areas of footfall and give it a go, it’s a novel, non-intrusive way of getting people to part with their change, especially in the name of grassroots sustainability.
Having spoken to a club that deployed this fundraising tactic, they generated more than £300 to put towards their pitch costs for the season, not bad going!
Raffle tickets, with unique prizes
Via Twitter, Kitlocker Juniors found the talented @ourashley, who hand paints garden gnomes among other things. So they sent him a picture of their home and away kits and asked him to paint them up with a club raffle in mind.
At £28 each they were reasonably inexpensive for the club to acquire, and the novelty of owning a unique garden gnome went down a storm. Tickets were charged at £2 each or 3 for £5 and they sold just short of 500 of tickets. Take out the gnomes and the cost of the raffle tickets and they raised over £430.
Whilst painted gnomes might not be an appropriate prize for some clubs and their demographic, the same raffle ticket process can be applied to a host of other unique, club specific prizes, for example:
- Team Photo Jigsaw
- Custom Club Crest via Simply The Crest
- A framed shirt, signed by all of the players
A Kitlocker Sponsorship Deck
We know that not everyone has the technical skills to make a flashy presentation which they can approach local businesses with. And that’s why we’ve devised our very own template that can be customised to your club.
Fill in your details here, and we’ll be in touch to provide you with your very own.
Last Man Standing
A firm favourite for many clubs. Utilise the network of stakeholders you already have by setting up a last man standing tournament.
Typically, a club will explain that a percentage will go to the winner, with the remaining amount going back to the club. Speaking from experience, we’ve seen 70/30 in the winner’s favour, down to a straight 50/50 split.
LMS is a great fundraising tactic, should the club have a wide enough network to amplify appropriately. The last thing you want to be doing is going to the effort of collecting money, chasing selections and updating your LMS sheet for the sake of £50. Get players, friends, family to join and you’ll be onto a winner (maybe even literally).
Create your competition on Google Sheet, give participants the link on view only and they’ll never have to pester you about how many people are left. Easy!
Here’s an example layout below.
Race Night
Whilst logistically a little harder to setup compared to a LMS, race nights are something many people look forward to throughout the season. We could write more than 1,000 words about how to setup a well-functioning race night, but instead we’ll leave that to the experts:
https://www.racenightservices.co.uk/how-to-run-a-race-night/
Club Fines
This one is probably aimed more at adult clubs, and even then you’d need to have buy in from all players before implementing a fining system. You hear it regularly in the pro game about fines for players turning up late, being on their phone etc, but it’s a little easier when a) the fining system has been established for a long time, and b) expendable income isn’t really an issue. Players are already paying subs to be there, so charging them on top of that may have some pushback.
On the flip side, it adds an extra layer of competitiveness (depending on whether you make this performance based), as well as making players more punctual.
Some fines we’ve come across that you could implement into your own version:
- Lateness
- Missing training/a match without a valid reason
- Not washing the kit/bibs after being designated that job for the week.
- Cutting socks down
- Scoring an OG
- Not attending a social event without a valid reason
- Forgetting your kit (stackable offence depending on what’s forgotten).
- Not paying subs in a timely manner.
Check out the fines lists from Central Midlands League North Division club Harworth Colliery below.
Get in touch!
If you’ve implemented any imaginative fundraising activities at your club, we’d love to hear about them. In grassroots sport, we’re all in it together, so it’s always great to share ideas and best practice.
Or, if this article has inspired you to try any of the methods listed above, we’d love to know about that too. Give us a shout on socials and let us know how you get on!
