Kiss The Pig – Sign up a few local celebrities or business owners to participate in this one. Make some jars with their photo at it, and at whatever event you have, put those jars out for people to put money in. After a fixed period of time, make the person with the most money in their jar kiss a pig at one of your events. People are voting with their dollars and can get very involved!

Charity Goat Raffle – This is one I’m going to be doing as part of fundraising for a mission trip to inner city Los Angeles in the spring. The idea is that you register people in a contest to win a goat, and then make them pay $10.00 (or whatever amount you want) to purchase “goat insurance” to prevent themselves from being entered. When they buy the insurance they also get to give away three raffle tickets to other people and the number of people the charity reaches will grow exponentially.

Adult Spelling Bee – Hold a charity adult spelling bee with an entry fee of $10.00 or $20.00. Have some sort of prize for the winner. People will have a lot of fun and you’ll bring in some good money if you can publicize the event well.

Pink Flamingos – Put 20 or 30 plastic pink flamingo’s in people’s lawns and then make them make a donation to your charitable organization to remove them. After they make a donation, allow them to specify someone else to receive the flamingos on their lawn.

Silent Auction – Have business owners and community members give car donations and other items for donation and then hold a silent auction and sell off the items to the highest bidder. This can be a significant amount of work, but it can also bring in thousands of dollars for your charity.

If you’re going to raise money for a charitable cause or non-profit organization, don’t just call people and ask for money or for them to donate cars or other items, have fun with it and more importantly make it fun for them!

Creative Fundraising Ideas for Your Non-Profit was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

The Joy of Giving – A lot of people will never appreciate what their money goes to until they see their charitable donations changing lives, whether it being seeing a 16 year old girl with a single mother getting a Christmas present for the first time in her life, a needy child getting a book-bag full of classroom supplies just before the first day of school, or someone receiving much needed medical care they would not have otherwise received. Once you see people truly affected by your gift, you’ll find an indescribable joy!

A Tax Deduction – You shouldn’t start writing checks just because you get a lower tax bill at the end of the year, but it’s another reason to give. Nobody likes to give money to the IRS each year, and being a generous giver will lower that bill each year. You can claim donations made to charities as a 501(c) as tax deductions. This means that if your tax-rate is 25% and you donate $1,000, you’ll have to pay $250 less in taxes each year.

Doing Good in the World – Remember what we’re doing here. We’re donating money to an organization that will work to help those in need. It doesn’t even need to be to an organization in need, you can just help someone where you see a serious need in their lives. There are a lot of situations that people find themselves through no fault of their own where they just need a bit of help. By us being charitable and helping our neighbors in need, we help them and eliminate the need for any inefficient centralized government programs to deal with those types of issues.

Giving Helps You Simplify – There are charitable organizations such as Good Will that will take your unwanted possessions, sell them and use the profits to help fund charitable causes. There are also organizations that will take used vehicles, used computers and the like and put them to good use for you. You could also hold your own charity garage sale to get rid of stuff as well. Giving is a great way to simplify your life and get rid of some of your extra material possessions that you really don’t want or need.

A lot of people who don’t give (I used to be one of them), did so because they wanted to keep their money and get ahead in the world and giving away one’s money doesn’t make their wealth accumulate in the slightest. If this sounds like you, find a charity you like, go down and visit it and write a check. Give giving a chance, you just might like it.

4 Reasons to Become a Generous Giver was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

Larry Steward was once down on his luck, destitute, and literally starving. He needed food so bad that he decided to sit down in a restaurant and enjoy a decent meal. Larry Steward didn’t have the money to pay, and it pained him so much that he had to resort to stealing to avoid starvation. Another customer had an idea what was going on and dropped $20 bill near Larry and told him, “I think you dropped that.” After that one simple act of generosity, Stewart resolved to be a giver as much as he was able each Christmas season, and he did just that.

For many years Stewart would wander around thrift stores, Salvation Army’s and just around the Kansas City area in a Santa Costume. He would hand out hundred dollar bills to anyone he saw in the store and then snuck off before a he would draw a crowd. He had intended to remain completely anonymous throughout his life, but last year he was struck with cancer. A publication outted him to the public and he decided to make the best of it by going public and encouraging others to be secret santas after he was gone. He made several media appearances telling about his life and how others can become secret santas. There’s now a “secret santa society” out there that’s following in his footsteps, doing random acts of kidness around the Christmas season.

One of Stewart’s close friends has now taken on the role of being the lead “Secret Santa” running the Secret Santa World website and is still spreading the message of doing random acts of kidness. Many of the secret santas remain completely anonymous. They lead by example, have a sense of humility and show compassion to the downtrodden.

This Christmas consider becoming a “Secret Santa” and doing and doing something generous for someone in need. It might not be handing money out on the street, it could be just about anything. It could be buying presents for a family who doesn’t have any money. it could be visting people in the Hospital over Christmas. There’s something very rewarding about giving that’s hard to describe, but once you use what you have to help someone out, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Whatever it is you decide to do, have fun with it, and be someone’s “Secret Santa” this year.

Become a “Secret Santa” This Christmas was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

For being in college I’m making a pretty good income. I budget my money wisely, save a lot of it, and invest it as wisely as I know how. These are all important parts of stewardship, but being a happy giver is just as important as all of those other aspects. It’s not that I was morally opposed to the idea of giving, there was just some sort of block inside of me. Part of me wanted to have a very clear picture of what my money would be doing and who it would be helping before I gave it away, but that wasn’t all of it. I hate to admit it, but there was definitely some greed insidem e. I would rather see my savings account balance increase than put food in the mouth of a hungry child, and that’s sick.

In the last few months there’s definitely been a real spiritually lead change in my heart when it comes to my opinion of giving. I first felt like a hypocrite for trying to teach others to be wise with their money while not being generous with the money I had been earning. I was easily earning two or three times what most college students earn in a year, but probably didn’t give away any more money than a typical college student would. When talking about finances wholistically, I would definitely think giving is a major part of it, but did not practice in the slighest.

I got sick of it and knew that it had to change. There as more causes worthy of donation than any one person can imagine and so many people that need help in the world, whether it be needing food, shelter, clothing, or spiritual guidance—and I wasn’t giving to any of them! The first step I took toward becoming a giver was supporting a child through Compassion International. The money would go to providing supplimental nutrition, health care, and spiritual guidance to a youth in a 3rd world country, and it was only $30.00 a month. It was a lot easier to give to that than to say the Red Cross, because I knew exactly where the money was going and could see how my donation benefited that one person.

I discussed the issue with one of my good friends with a strong faith and sharp mind and asked him what he thought about my dilemma. He asked me if I tithed, and I told him that I did not. He told me something that really made me think, “If you start a pattern of giving now, 20 years down the l ine when you have and are raising your children to become righteous, they’ll see your giving and pattern it. They’ll become big givers too.” My heart stirred to give even more. $30.00 a month would just not cut it.
I felt that it was the right time to start supporting my local church in a big way. They were facing a bit of a tight spot and the building fund just wasn’t where it needed to be, so I decided to start giving 10% of my income to my local church—the classic Christian tithe. My studies lead me to believe that there’s no biblical commandment for Christians who live by the new testatment covenant to tithe, but there are all sorts of verses telling us to be generous givers, and practicing a tithe is a great way to give. In otherwords, you shouldn’t tithe because you have to, but rather because you want to.

For now, I’m going to keep up my support for a Compassion child as well as giving to the church. I’m sure I’ll be lead to give more in the future, and it’s exciting to see all the amazing work that my extra money can do when it would just otherwise be sitting in my savings account not doing anyone any good.

If you’ve never given to a charity that works with a cause that you’re particularly passionate about, I’d like to challenge you today to start. You don’t have to start out by giving away 10% of your income, but you should at least try to give out $50 a month to a charity that you support and increase that amount over time. There are all sorts of worthy organizations to be donated to that are facing budget short-falls as the economy slows down. By giving a consistent amount on a regular basis to one of them, you are creating a pattern of giving and well on your way to being a generous giver.

How I Learned To Stop Being So Greedy and Become a Giver was created by and is property of American Consumer News.

The reason most people don’t give other people cash and rather give them gift cards is because they want the person receiving the gift card to use the money on themselves as something special, and not just let those funds disappear into their regular spending money. If you want to give them money to explicitly spend on themselves for fun, then do it, but don’t do it in the form of a gift card. Get creative about it. Attach a letter telling them why gift cards are terrible, terrible things and tell them to spend the money on themselves and request a report on how much fun they had spending it. It might not be the best gift idea in the world, but it sure is better handing out a gift card!

When you buy someone a gift card, you are sending them a message that you know how to manage their money better than they are, and should be able to decide which store they spend the money you give them at. It might surprise you, but not every goes to the same restaurants and retailers that you do. In fact, gift cards are never even used. That doesn’t even count the gift cards that are used but only half the balance ever gets eaten up and then it just sits in a drawer somewhere while the balance slowly declines over-time thanks to inactivity fees which are completely junk fees. Chances are they’ll be hit with all sorts of other fees which are designed to suck money off the balance of the card.

There’s only one time when it makes sense to use a gift card, and that’s when you’re given a discount on it. Since a lot of people realized that gift cards are total junk, many restaurants have been offering gift-cards at a discounted rate. You might be able to get a $25 gift-card for just $20.00. In this case it makes sense to get a gift-card if you know that you’re going to make use of it. It’s essentially free money, but that’s the only time it makes sense to ever purchase a gift-card, otherwise you’re just putting un-needed restrictions on your money!

Gift Cards are the Worst Possible Present to Buy Someone This Christmas was created by and is property of American Consumer News.