As a college student, I became very passionate about volunteering and community service. I spent several hours a week in campus meetings, brainstorming with a group of fellow volunteers, the creation of new fundraisers that would be more successful than those in previous years.

Volunteering through college organizations, and having students in the university being a primary source of funds, it was vital to create ideas that would entice them to donate, because it's no secret college students are on a tight budget already. This required our event to not only benefit a great charitable cause, such as children in the hospital, but it also had to be fun  and well worth a college student's time and money.

I, along with a group of devoted students, put together one of the most successful fundraisers our organization had ever done, and one of the easiest as well, with very little work or preparaiton on our part.

The fundraiser was called: Black Light College Night!

"Black Night College Night."

The idea is to have your organization rent out a local night club or bar (where local college students like to party) the entire night (usually 11pm-2am), for your black light party. While most night clubs are too expensive for a non-profit to rent and make money, most of them will be willing to work out a deal for your organization, seeing that it's for a good cause. If you can provide the night club owner/manager with legitimate information on your charity, they may allow you to use their facility for a fraction of the cost on a night, that is normally not busy or a night when they are usually closed. It is still possible to raise money, though! The key is to ADVERTISE AHEAD OF TIME!

In our situation, the night club owner allowed us to use his facility on a Tuesday night, from 11pm-2am, and we paid him between $75 and $150 for the night (much less than it would be if we weren't a non-profit organization). We charged the regular admission price at the door, which was $5 per person, and kept all the profit from that. The owner and his staff made their money from alcohol sales.

A few weeks prior to the event, we made fliers advertising our fundraiser (including all relevant information about the event and our cause) and distributed them on campus and posted them in windows of downtown businesses near the night club, with the business owners' permission. We encouraged people attending to wear white clothes and paint their shirts with black light paint. We also purchased boxes of glow sticks from an online source, that had them for a discounted price. We bought about 1,000 glowsticks, in order to give some away for free, to each person who came through the door. We also painted some white sheets with black light paint. For a neat glowing effect, we filled empty alcohol bottles with liquid laundry detergent and placed them near black lights in the night club; the detergent glows in against the black light!That was virtually all of the set-up we had to do.

The night of event, we assigned 30 minute shifts to groups of 2 or 3 people within our organization to sit at the door of the night club and accept the admission fee. The other group members were free to enjoy the atmosphere with the rest of the college students in the night club, until their turn to take a shift at the door.

Overall, our event was a huge success, as we profited about $1,500.00 that night. I encourage your organization to give this fundraiser a try, and also to brainstorm your own ideas; perhaps ideas to add to this one to make it an even bigger success!