Fundraising Part III

Well yesterday I talked about my fundraising idea of a Wine Tasting.

Today I have a different idea.

I’m sure your church has probably, like ours, put out a church cookbook. We did this in our church last year. Now folks usually enjoy a good church (or Kiwanis, or Junior League) cookbook. But unfortunately, frequently the only people who buy the cookbook are the folks attending the church who not coincidentally are already the people who are tithing. So you are raising money from the people who are already giving. This is problematic.

The whole idea here is how to earn money from OTHER folks, folks who haven’t already reached as deep as their pockets will allow.

So if you are thinking along the “book” line, the first thing to realize is that e-books is possibly the way to go. Now I’m probably not selling the idea to you all-after all, if you are reading my blog you are reasonably to extremely Internet savvy and therefore comfortable with the idea of e-books. But the idea of ebooks is brand new to practically everyone I’ve mentioned it to at my church.

What I like about the idea of ebooks is:

#1-it is extremely low cost to set up. You don’t have to pay upfront to print off a ton of copies of the book that might not be sold. There are even free e-book compilers out there, or low cost ones. (this one, ebookcompiler.com got 4 cows from tucows.com which I personally trust) There are also some services where you can have your ebook online for purchase as a print on demand (ie they print it out as a bound book one at a time as people order them) or as a PDF file. Obviously they get a percentage of the selling price and you get a percentage. Booklocker out of Bangor Maine is such a company. (*disclaimer-I’ve never used either of these services, just found out about them online)

#2-You could sell them online, and therefore possibly sell them to an audience far beyond that usually reached with a church fundraiser. The possible profit could also be much larger. For example, depending on the topic (more on that later) I could put a link to the ebook on my sidebar and some of you might be interested in buying it. That would never happen with ye-old church cookbook.

#3-Books are written using peoples knowledge and time-both resources that we could probably get folks to actually donate from the congregation.

#4-Unlike a bake sale, dinner or event a book can be sold continuously over a long period of time. Therefore it could be a continued revenue stream. Again this depends on the topic.

Now all of this gets to the possible topic of the book.

If I tell you all my idea for a topic of an ebook is someone going to steal it, run off and beat me to the punch? Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to take that chance and trust my readers.

I thought that we could write a book on something like “Life 101-all the things you should have learned in school but didn’t”. Basically a guide for highschool and college graduates that covers basic life skills that they might need but haven’t been taught. Sort of divided up into topics.

The legal section could include things like how to read and understand a lease and a waiver, the financial section could include how credit works, how to make a budget, how to balance a checkbook, the difference between a want and a need. Household could cover how to read a recipe, write a grocery list, read a nutritional label (all that home ec stuff they don’t teach any more) sew on a button.

We have lawyers, accountants, seamstresses, and all sorts of other professionals in the congregation. We could ask them to write various sections of the book in a “how to” list. A few of us who are more “writerly” types rewrite it in a fun style, keep it consistent for the entire book, add in illustration, charts, etc. . . . bibliography, web index all that sort of thing.

I think this would be a very involved process that would take over a year. There is no way we could get it done for this years graduation in May, but we could get it done for next years (08) and even publicize it with some hard copies that could be sold locally for folks to buy and give to their highschool and college grads. Once it is done we could continue to sell it for several years. Can you say residual sales??? And it is the sort of thing that could be updated and resold every 5 years or so, or could have “spinoffs”.

What about “everything you need to know to be a Housewife?”