Book Review -- 199 Fun and Effective Events for Nonprofit Organizations

Welcome to Planner's Pointer's Planners Pointers is a blog and talk cast to help beginning event planners with their event planning. Give them ideas on planning better events, books to read and websites to discover.


I first learned about "199 Fun and Effective Fundraising Events for Nonprofit Organizations" by Eileen Figure Sandlin and Richard Helweg as a suggestion from Amazon.com. (It's a little scary how Amazon keeps track of your purchases sometimes, isn't it?)

Always in search of a good fund raising ideas I ordered the book. If you are a nonprofit organization looking for a new idea, then here are 199 of them. No, not every idea will work for all organizations, but it does give you a jumping off point to build your own. If your organization has never done a certain type of event, the book does give a good overview. I especially like the chart at the head of each idea that covered the degree of difficulty on six major tasks of any fundraiser: Estimated Cost, Obtaining Sponsors, Finding a Venue, Recruiting Volunteers, Preparation and Execution. I liked the best tips offered by various nonprofits at the end of the book. The book is arranged from simple to complex events gives the book a nice flow.

At the beginning of the book, there is a disclaimer about accuracy and completeness. Good thing from my viewpoint because there were a several instances where I would have added more volunteers, more time to execute the event and added event insurance in some cases. However; the authors do ask the reader when scheduling events make sure there aren't other competing events. Also the book says that if you are passing out flyers, not to put them in mailboxes because it's against the law. A law that some either don't know or have forgotten.

While some seasoned fund raisers may look at the book as a been there, done that and got the tee shirt list of ideas, for the beginning special event planner, it would be a good book to add to the shelf.

Planner's Pointers is written by me, Mary Pam Kilgore, of Kilgore Business Services, LLC You may reach me through my website www.kilgorebusiness.com You can find my blog at http://plannerspointers.blogspot.com/