Back in July, I wrote a PM entitled “Thinking Caps On”. As usual, it was brilliantly written with virtually no grammatical errors. I’m sure most of you have it clipped and hanging on your refrigerators. In the rare event that you have not committed those inspirational words to memory, the premise was that we need to come up with some new ways of fundraising in the COVID era.
Given that the entirety of our current year’s Giving Budget is coming out of our Foundation reserves, there has been some back and forth between the Club board and the Foundation board on how much this amount should be. The Club board has adopted a $55,000 amount while the Foundation board is unwilling to go beyond $44,000. As the Foundation explained during a recent Club Assembly, they are concerned that our fundraising events will be cancelled again this year meaning that they will have to fund a significant portion of next year’s Giving Budget out of Foundation reserves (note, the formula is that a given year’s fundraising goes towards the following year’s Giving Budget).
The Club board is in the process of finalizing both a $55,000 Giving Budget and a $44,000 contingency Giving Budget. If we can raise an additional $11,000 by the end of this Rotary year (i.e. June 30th, 2021) on top of the money we raised from Flags For Heroes, the Foundation should feel comfortable that the reserves will not be depleted next year and there should be no issue with the $55,000 budget.
Our big annual fundraising event is Run With Rotary held in late April/early May. The all-knowing pandemic prognosticator Joshtradamus Turner decreed that is unlikely that the Run will be held in its usual format. Some encouraging news about a vaccine was released yesterday but I have to concur with Josh’s assessment. However, even if that is the case, we will still hold some virtual 5K race which will raise some money (and, as an aside, we need a chairperson for the event in place by December so let me know if you are interested).
Which leads us to our putting our thinking caps back on. Our Rotary District 7475 is recommending a fundraising platform called Eventgroove which is well suited for virtual fundraising events. There is an hour long video presentation from the District which you can watch by clicking HERE. Yes, it’s long but it does have a lot of ideas. Watch it and see if any ideas resonate with you. Think about other organizations doing fundraising events and think about what might work with our club during these COVID times.
The best timeframe for a fundraising event would be somewhere between January and March so let’s get thinking!
Rotarically Yours,
Zoltan Nagy
President
Rotary Club of Montgomery/Rocky Hill (NJ)
Zoltan Nagy
President
Rotary Club of Montgomery/Rocky Hill (NJ)