Nov 05 2009

Fundraising for Community Groups

Category: Fundraising — Peter Thomson @ 3:45 pm

Fundraising has always been a major source of income for many organisations like community groups, sporting clubs, and the Parents and Friends (or Parents and Citizens) Associations of schools. With restricted only financial aid from governments, most of these establishments would not be financially viable without the good and tireless fundraising exploits of their members. As an example sporting clubs charge membership fees but with expenses ever increasing, it wouldn’t be feasible for them to exist financially without fundraising.

The types of fundraising opportunities nowadays are many and varied. There is a plethora of fundraising entities around going to try and entice organisations to utilize their services. From selling bottled water, wrist bands, homewares, clothing, jewelry and show bags to equine riding, shopping tours and engraving bricks and pavers. The alternatives are truly amazing and seemingly endless.

Schools and sporting clubs have traditionally stuck by the occasion honoured ways of fundraising by selling donuts, lollies, chocolates and biscuits. Over the past few years, even so, due to child obesity issues from poor eating habits and below working out, most of these orthodox fundraising products have started to fall from favour with fundraising entities.

This has allowed the less traditional fundraising ideas to acquire a foot in the threshold so to speak of this multi-million dollar industry.

So where do you become when you would like to get moving with fundraising? Say for example your child is in their second year of school, and you have chosen to turn into more actively engaged in the comings and goings of their school. You attend the first P and C Association meeting of the year, and you end up on the Fundraising Committee for the year. You would like to impress your peers; you would like to make a difference and do the job successfully.

There are many reasons why the school may need to fundraise. It may need funds for some extra computers in the library, or new playground equipment or perhaps they would love to see a roof over a new walkway. How you should behave, where to get rolling to raise the required funds? These days the majority of people are turning to the internet.

The internet is now the hottest and powerful tool for locating details, far more widely used now than the local newspapers or the yellow pages. When searching for ideas or information, the majority of people now do not consider any options apart from the internet. There are many search engines accessible to the internet user, like Yahoo!, Bing, Altavista, Ask and Lycos. But by far the most popular search engine online is Google.

ComScore is a marketing investigation company that provides marketing data and services to most of the internet’s largest businesses. According to estimates brought out by comScore at the conclusion of 2008, Google ended the year with 63.5 percent market share of all search queries performed in the U.S that year! That is a large slice of the pie.

Google provide a Keyword Tool, which allows access to information regarding the hottest search phrases used by internet users when searching on Google. The hottest search terms carried over to Google for fundraising are in fact fundraising, fundraiser, school fundraising ideas, fundraiser ideas, ideas for fundraising, fundraisers and fundraising ideas.

The consequences from all of these searches show a wide variety of sites that the user can access, the majority of them being fundraising directories that list many fundraising entities offering their services.<

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Oct 28 2009

The Australian Building Business During WWII

Category: Family — Mike Hindmarsh @ 12:59 am

After the declaration of war in September 1939 house construction went through a period of decreasing activity. But it did not drop to its minimal level until February 1942 when National Security Regulations posed severe restrictions.

Private building ceased in many areas and was limited in others. However, under the War Housing Program, state and commonwealth authorities did continue with essential housing, such as that needed for munitions workers and their families.

Clear indication of the degree of change is seen in the official statistics. More than 40000 new homes were built throughout Australia in the financial year 1938-39, but in 1942-1943 there were fewer than 4000.’

In the editorial of the Australian Home Beautiful for January 1942, we read of conditions up to that time. Building restrictions, at the moment of writing, limit expenditure on new domestic buildings to 3000 and on renovations to 250; but conditions grow harder week by week. In spite of this, a great deal of new and interesting building is being carried on over a widespread area and this will continue as long as materials are available.

War in Europe and North Africa was distant enough for Australia to seem relatively secure. With the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and their inexorable advance in our direction, any remaining complacency evaporated.

A. V. Jennings, the well-known construction company founded in 1932, continued building houses on its construction within 25 miles (40 km) of the Melbourne GPO as well as restrictions on the transfer of land brought development of the estate to a halt.

As early as May 1941 wartime conditions had begun to cause shortages of building materials and dwindling sales. In that month A.V. Jennings advertised seventeen villa sites and seven business sites, all lots to include, electricity, gas, sewerage, roads, paths and crossings.’

Of the 121 residential blocks, fifty-nine houses had been completed by the beginning of 1942. They were typical of the well-built, double-brick houses constructed by Jennings over the previous decade. Beauview Estate was in a very attractive elevated area with panoramic views and a mere six-and-a-half miles (10.50 km) from the city.

In 1942, with home building now at a standstill, A.V. Jennings averted complete disaster with the sale of all unsold blocks on the estate to the large Melbourne estate agency T.M. Burke. As a company Jennings actually gathered strength through the challenges offered by wartime government construction contracts, so that when it returned to housing on a large scale in the mid-1950s it was able to regain and extend its early reputation in the domestic field.

Brick houses of the type built by A.V Jennings between 1932 and 1942 were basically conservative in their design when compared with the few examples of International Modern built at the same time. Some of the forms or details suggested the continuing popularity of `Spanish Mission’ or `Old English’, but generally, there was a tendency toward a common sense functionalism with easily maintained surfaces, modern kitchens, hot-water services reticulated to five or six points, internal toilets and many other features taken for granted by generations.

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