Our Outstanding Cosmetics Fundraiser
by Ani
(CA)
Although the investments I made were killing me since I started from zero and scraped all my savings I had made off of doing makeup for random people. I needed tools, makeup, skin care products, mirrors, chairs etc. The cause would be for providing excellent makeup for women and girls in my community with affordable prices. This way I would serve them with awesome customer service, teach other women the secrets of makeup and how to become a professional and have my studio gain more customers.
I was a bit hopeless at first but saw in a magazine that a similar company had started a fundraiser for their needs and I instantly thought that my team could do the same thing, with being original and stating out all the useful facts in order to make our fundraiser work! So we got together, wrote down all the cons, thought of a title and started suggesting it to different magazines.
The investment I made for the advertisement really did pay off. We didn't want to make the fundraiser be a boring "help us out" charity, so we included a deal that caught everyone's attention: Pay 10 dollars and get pampered by professional makeup artists plus find out 5 top makeup secrets! It sure did work. Pretty soon our team constantly kept getting calls from women of different ages. Most of them really did start attending the fundraiser and had a wonderful time knowing about us. There were although people who thought it were a joke and didn't think we were professional enough because the price was low, but despite that we had a minimum of almost 20 girls a day attending the charity.
After a while we also decided to include contests and prizes to attract even more attention. The contest was a makeup based question which was: "Look at a certain female and decide her skin undertone color." Not everyone can figure out a woman's undertone color and the prize was a powder brush from MAC cosmetics which is a bit expensive but worth it. That way the women who participated in the contest brought along other friends who participated in the fundraiser. So we started having even more people attending and making more money.
It was really a great experience and after doing this fundraiser for 6 consecutive months, we reached almost 15,000 dollars! We would've reached more without paying for the advertisement in the magazine and providing service every day rather than 3 times a week as we were doing. But it was definitely worth it. We got to buy enough products for all four of us makeup artists.
My dad was so proud of us that he decided to hire employees to renovate the studio and also bought us mirrors, he told me that he never would have imagined me doing such a thing and rewarded me and my team for all the effort and hard work we put in. Spending hours smiling, doing makeup, shopping for prizes, dealing with the advertisement agents, a lot of work was put in. We also purchased different fancy chairs, professional makeup brushes and a large variety of cosmetics.
If you ever want to start a fundraiser make sure to always write down every single idea that comes to mind, because if you don't your brilliant thoughts drift away and you're left again to re-think what you can do to achieve success. Think about your goals, the causes, the pros AND the cons. Work in a TEAM, never do anything alone and know how to market yourselves and deal with advertisement agents.
Good luck and I'm thankful for sharing my inspiring story here.
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