I’ll try and keep this brief. My son has been a member of Edinburgh diving club for about 8 years. The club needs to raise about £10000 a year to subsidise competition costs. As the club has grown and kids from less affluent (including ourselves) backgrounds are invited to join this fundraising is more important than ever. Over the years fundraising has gotten harder, bag packing for example was very productive but supermarkets seem less keen on this and there’s only so many times you can ask friends and family to sponsor or buy raffle tickets. We’ve just had a quiz night, a bake sale and are about to do a sponsored spin at the local shopping centre and the Edinburgh marathon/5k for the kids. But I’m thinking a better idea would be to approach businesses or wealthy individuals for donations or sponsorship, as it’s an Edinburgh based club I’m thinking RBS, Standard Life, Tom Farmer etc and then work our way down the chain if necessary. But what’s the best way to approach these kind off people or organisations? Email, phone calls, Twitter? Is there anything I’ve missed? We are open to any ideas you’ve got but £300 at a bake sale is not working out at the moment. FYI there were four or five divers associated with the club at the Commonwealth games last year and at last months junior Elite GB champs they won two Gold medals, so it’s quite a successful club.

Co-op are very good at this; our library has done well out of the scheme, but I suspect you may need to overcome an elitest hobby perception, rather than the (understandable) nobility of a volunteer-run library and really push the community benefits angle 🙂 .

https://www.coop.co.uk/local-causes

SSE have opened for bids your club might qualify.
Wren and Viridor also have funds but they are closed.until later in the year.

Looks like you have to be a charity to qualify for SSE but Scottish Hydro and Scottish Water were names that were mentioned that we might approach.

Looks like you have to be a charity

Any reason you’re not?

I assume you have a club committee including chair, child protection officer and treasurer plus a simple Constitution. If you do, being a charity in Scotland is minor paperwork and opens up a lot more funding.

Many large companies have specific departments for “Corporate Social Responsibility” and are well used to dealing with these types of requests. Just be up front and ask. In some cases there will be annual targets to be met and they are looking for ideas.

Oh and

https://fundingscotland.com/

As above I’d assume scio registration would be simple for an established club. Only pita is annual books.

Only pita is annual books.

But you would be doing this anyway.

Thanks for that. Charity seems like a good idea to me, older committee members might not but they’re not the ones with kids, spending thousands a year on training and competitions.

It’s tough getting folk to sponsor you now, how about doing your own events instead of doing the likes of the Edinburgh 5k?. I organise a 5k based from work, it’s this friday, and all the proceeds go to the local foodbank, fiver a head, work buys the medals and race numbers which cost 250 for 200 of them from runningimp. Got 90 odd entries thus far, I’ll probably get 130 or thereabouts, that’s 650 quid from one minor event. Takes very little organising really, and I bloody enjoy it.

You’d just need a local employer to buy you the likes of the medals etc, most big employers have charity committees, they love the kudos.

I hate supermarket bag packing, just seems a lazy way to get money, local kids rugby club is always doing it.

Aviva do a large Community Fund each year that you can place yourself forward for, they have a large office in Bishopsbriggs, so some links to Scotland

Rather than full on charity, would a Community Sports Club be acceptable to donors? Seems like similar goals.

Other angle is to punt around to find a decent sized business with a head honcho that is already immersed (!) in that sport. (I actually read it as diving as in scuba / exploration diving at first).

Or a business that is water related in some form. Various businesses here are good for donations, even in kind for raffles (worth exploring as well) and some have pet projects – community or themed – that are a good fit. Some are not so good and that’s fine.

If they are as successful as you say they are (and well done BTW), why not speak to the kit suppliers (Speedo or whoever) to get not only kit sponsorship, but additional donations too?

Hm, may be rules about clubs getting sponsorship (as opposed t donations) from suppliers and companies.

Worth checking the rules about sponsorship, as a company might be more willing to sponsor your tracksuits for example than just giving you money to subsidise them. Try to think of ways that a sponsoring company gets something back for their money.

Tesco do the coins that shoppers use to vote for a choice of charities to receive some funding- worth a try at the local stores?

Check what with other parents what their employers will do- when I worked at Barclays our office had monthly charity collections for causes supported by employees. The amount raised was matched by the company (up to c£500 I think). See if they do similar?

I think there may be conflicts with Scottish Swimming and their sponsors when it comes to sponsorship. The other problem is getting parents on board to help, there’s a reluctance to get involved. I think there needs to be more transparency about the amounts of money that are needed to be raised. Parents of kids that have only been doing it for a year or two don’t see the need to do it as their outlay is relatively small compared to those of us that have been doing it for years.

I can’t answer your original question. Most organisations that I’ve had sponsorship with have always had a personal connection to the organisation. We recently got sponsorship for a CX league but it was a business man who raced in it.

My mtb club uses https://www.easyfundraising.org.uk/. It’s only a small club but pays the website and affiliation fees each year.

Could you make any money out of taster sessions? Charge a small amount and get volunteer coaches. Much easier on a bike than underwater?