Austin Improv

Hi everyone. I just got back from a meeting with Chris Trew regarding adding the element of fundraising to the AIC.

I've been involved in non-profit fundraising/events/volunteer stuff for over 10 years so I thought I'd offer up some suggestions on how we could go about incorporating it into our community.

Chris and I (and also Justin) talked about a lot of options for the upcoming year, while realizing we don't want to spread ourselves too thin and also realizing that a good solid fundraising program takes a good while to develop.

So, up for discussion at the nest meeting:

A fundraising event for AIC: Should this be.......a brand new event the likes of which we've never seen that's purely fundraising, or work with an already very successful event that is only bound to get more successful that we could connect to, such as Wafflefest?

Continued corporate sponsorship for events like Wafflefest: mo money mo money

Grants: We need a good eager writer who wants to start writing grants.....Justin and I are going to go to the Hogg Library soon for a tour.

Creating an Infrastructure for Individual Soliciation: most non-profits send out a letter or an email blast asking their audience, friends, families, members for gifts. We may never do this, but I'd like us to capable of it. We might very well be surprised at the response.

Mailing Lists: Being ridiculously vigilant about capturing names/addresses/emails from EVERYONE and assigning this to stage management potentially.
Also, up for discussion-are individual troups willing to share mailing lists for maximum effect?

So. That's just some of the fundraising goodness I'm serving up in a few weeks.

Bear in mind its not all happening at once and we want to maximize our efforts with marketing, ticket sales, etc.

Fundraising doesn't have to be scary. Its just getting the people who already love us to invest in us to keep us around so they can love us more.

Anyone want to be on my committee???

And also, finance, marketing and events would tie into fundraising. I know I definitely need to talk with Ms. May at some point!

Hm. Waffle Fest is a Heroes production, not an AIC production. Tagging on to them might take money away from the Heroes, and we want all our production companies, improv schools, shows, and theatres to continue to thrive.

I say start small, but let us make an original fundraiser. Seems like FALL or around the Holidays is a good time for fundraising (for tax purposes). Any pros or cons for doing it around the time we have our awards banquet??

Thanks! I am still trying to work out what events belong to which group. I don't want to step on any toes!

I think we can safely say that most events happening are at least co-produced by the AIC. I would consider Waffle Fest such.

Thanks Andy, I'd really like to see Wafflefest continue to grow. Its been fantastic to see it attract more people and more players.

I'd be happy to help you.

I was working on doing fundraising for town lake park this past year in association with some groups I'm apart of. It was an independently lead project and other duties for those groups got me distracted so it didn't really go anywhere. I intended to pick it up again next year, so I could probably take some pointers from this experience and a professional like yourself since I was seemingly reinventing the wheel with everything I was doing.

I've seen some discussion threads on it already, but we'll probably have to scrape together some more specifics. Please PM me to let me know how I can help now or when that time comes that we have more to work with.

-Mike