Have you ever thought about the environmental impact of sending a fundraising pack in the post?

2021-09-01 | Fundraising

In my time researching fundraising packs, I have ordered quite a few fundraising packs from charities big and small (I donated to each of these charities as I wasn’t able to fundraise for all of them). I aimed to understand what is included, how environmentally friendly are they. I stated that I was doing a Bake sale at work for each of the packs I ordered, here is what I found:

Nearly all were an A4 envelope and made a “thud” when landing on the door mat. Upon opening they were stuffed with the one size fits all fundraising pack. So the first job is to go through the wad of materials to find out what’s relevant to my bake sale.

Needless to say I picked out a handful of materials which could be of use to my bake sale. The rest of the materials I kept for a bit just in case I needed any of them but ultimately went into the recycle bin.

This was very thought provoking, it got me thinking about the carbon footprint and environmental impact of sending these packs and the waste they produce not just the emissions of delivering this pack to my front door but the print emissions…

Did the chosen printer source recycled paper and environmentally friendly ink? How are they offsetting their carbon footprint for all the power needed to operate their machinery and send the printed materials to the charity? What is the environmental price for the materials that have gone unused in the packs I received?

It then occurred to me that regardless of how much the printer and delivery companies do to reduce their environmental impact and offset their carbon emissions at the heart of this process is the charity…

So, what can charities do?

Well one they can reduce the materials in the pack and make them more relevant depending on the activity type to prevent so many materials going to waste. However this is going to take time and resource to organise which I appreciate is not the best use of your staff or volunteers time.

The other option is to get your fundraisers to download and print the materials themselves, this way they cut out delivery emissions, their home printer uses less power than a professional printer, they only print what they need, and they can use the paper and ink of their choice.

At FundraizingHero not only do we offer the ability for your fundraisers to download the materials to help your charity be more environmentally friendly but we personalise the fundraising materials with the information they entered about their activity, so they don’t need to handwrite the ‘what’ ‘when’ and ‘where’ you see on so many empty belly posters it’s all done for them.

Plus, our set of over 35 different activity illustrations means fundraisers can have materials depicting the activity they are planning not just the one design for all.

Our charity admin also gives you visibility of how they personalised their materials, so you know what they are planning and which materials they downloaded from the fundraising pack. Find out more about our Fundraising Pack Creator.

Environment, Fundraising

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