Raising Money for Adult Basic Skills: Corporate and Community Service Club Spelling Bees

Program Management colleagues,

Money is tight. Public funds and grants from charitable and corporate foundations are now limited and highly competitive. In this climate, how are you raising funds? Do you have an individual donor campaign? Are you scouring charitable foundation websites for new funding tips? Do you do fundraisers, such as spelling bees ?

The corporate spelling bee is a well-developed fundraising strategy, often capable of bringing in significant dollars. It may start slowly, but over time it can build a significant corporate commitment and raise big bucks. It has a winning formula of enabling corporations to support a good cause in their communities, and also set up a usually good natured, but sometimes fierce, corporate competition that can build corporate sponsor engagement over time. Money is raised by asking competing corporations to buy tables of high-priced seats at the event that they usually donate to their corporate or community guests. These spelling bees are usually fun, entertaining, and raise significant funds for adult literacy/basic skills programs. Does your program organize a corporate spelling bee? If so, tell us what you do, how you do it, and send us to your website, if you have one, in which your corporate spelling bee is described.

Another kind of spelling bee, on a smaller scale but still worthwhile, is the community social service club spelling bee. Here's an article describing a small Rotary Club-sponsored spelling bee for adult literacy in Ontario, N.Y. http://13wham.com/news/local/annual-spelling-bee-raises-money-for-literacy-programs  Do you have Rotary, Kiwanis, or other community small business social service club-sponsored spelling bees to raise money for your program? If so, tell us about them and point us to your web page describing them.

David J. Rosen, Moderator

Program Management CoP

djrosen123@gmail.com