Hi All,
We are frequently approached by student groups interested in having
fund-raising events/drives for community agencies or charities as they are
seeking suggestions for where to give the money they raise - often less
than $1,000, though sometimes more. Often the students can tell us the
kind of organization they are interested in supporting (i.e. agenices
working on women's issues, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, etc.), but other than
that, they often look to us for complete guidance concerning their
donation. This is often compounded by the requests being more or less
last-minute (at least from a CBOs planning perspective).
While we are pleased to be a resource for these students, we are aware of
the responsibility it places on us to be representing the many agencies
with whom we work, and their various needs. We primarily work with these
agencies regarding ongoing and one-time service projects, and typically
don't ask them to share information with us about their other resource
needs. We would like to find a way to obtain better information about
those needs, so that we can be a support the agencies and the students who
might fundraise on their behalf.
We would be interested in learning how others in the field find out about
agency needs and respond to such requests, so as to help us in our
planning. One thought we have is to draft a simple questionnaire for our
partner agencies to ask them what kinds of needs they have, and how they
might like to work with students who fundraise, so that we can have
information on-hand for these groups. Of course, we don't want to start
a stampede of interest, when we only get a limited number of student
requests each year, but we want to be able to respond to the requests in
a slightly better way than we are able to at this point.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions you may have,
David
--David Grossman TEL: 215-898-4831 Director FAX: 215-573-3665 Program for Student-Community Involvement University of Pennsylvania email: 200 Houston Hall, 3417 Spruce Street grossman@pobox.upenn.edu Philadelphia, PA 19104-6306