Get your company involved

Employee fundraising is a great way of motivating your staff and encouraging team building, all the while raising money for a worthy cause.  Whatever fundraising ideas your employees come up with, we will help make them successful, and fun!  Whether they want to run the Virgin London Marathon or hold a Great Cake Bake event, we will be on hand to assist with organisation and to provide support and encouragement.

We already have a calendar of events and can supply you with a fundraising pack filled with tips to get you started, as well as information such as how to get the best PR attention for your event.  We can also discuss bespoke events with you, in order to give your staff a truly unique experience.

There are also non-financial ways in which your company can show support for
St Dunstan's.  A gifts in kind partnership is a great way for your company to showcase its products or services and for staff to put their expertise to good use, helping us to improve the services we offer our blind veterans.  Donations could be anything from larger items such as computers, to smaller goods or services that can be auctioned or raffled off.  You could even make a gift of shares.  If your company can help in this way, we would love to hear from you.

We offer a range of volunteering opportunities for  your staff, not only at our main training centres in Brighton and Sheffield, but also throughout the UK.  We also recognise that your staff have very specific skills which could be of great benefit to both our beneficiaries and the charity as a whole.  Volunteering is a great way for your staff to give something back and can also help them learn or develop new skills and engage with their local communities.  Ways in which your staff can volunteer include:

• Helping at our training centres
• Helping at events and annual reunions
• Pro bono work utilising your staff to help professionally
• Organising street collections

Regardless of how your staff choose to volunteer, we will ensure they have our full support, as well as relevant training (and CRB checks) where appropriate.

Another way to support St Dunstan's is for you to adopt us as your company's Charity of the Year.  A partnership with St Dunstan's will have a positive impact on both your staff and your company and will enable you to really make a difference to the lives of blind veterans.  Our dedicated team will work with you to organise a bespoke calendar of events to involve all of your staff, and will ensure that you have a lot of fun along the way!

Payroll Giving is a simple and regular way to give to your charity of choice, and it is tax efficient too.  Besides the obvious benefits to your chosen charity, Payroll Giving can also be good for your business, reinforcing your position as a good corporate citizen.  Setting up a scheme is easy and the costs are minimal so to find out more about the scheme and how to get started, visit our Payroll Giving page.

You can also increase the value of your employees' giving by developing a matched giving scheme.  This is a plan whereby you can match pound for pound what each of your employees give as part of Payroll Giving, with the flexibility to put a cap on once gifts reach a certain amount.  Matched giving can also be applied to employee fundraising and even volunteering, by 'paying' employees for their volunteering time with a donation to their charity.  Not only will this inspire your staff to give more, it will also boost morale within the workplace at the same time as raising your company's profile.

Through sponsorship your company could help to promote our services and at the same time gain brand association with a topical and pertinent cause.  We have a number of events or groups that you could support, including:

• In Touch with Art 2010 - an event which examines accessibility for blind museum and gallery audiences, to held at London's V&A Museum on 13-14 October 2010
• Our numerous challendge events, including the Spinnaker Tower Challenge
• Our annual Charity Clay Pigeon Shooting Day in Bisley
• The Younger St Dunstaner Group - a network set up specially for those
  St Dunstaners of working age whose needs differ greatly from those of our older beneficiaries
• Activity weeks for St Dunstaners held at our Brighton training centre, including rifle shooting, archery, and gardening
• Gala events e.g. balls, dinners, concerts

To sponsor any of the above or to discuss other options, please contact the Partnerships Team.