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If you're a ratified York SU student group, this page will cover the key things you need to know about fundraising for charity, or for your student group. If you are a College Committee interested in fundraising, please visit the College Committee Resource Hub for further information and guidance. If you are a non-ratified student group, or just a student interested in fundraising, please note that some of the information will not be accurate or applicable to you.
Fundraising for Charity
As the University of York Students' Union is a registered charity, all of our student groups fall under our registered charity status and have to follow fundraising regulations and legal guidelines to ensure as a charity, when fundraising for another charity we remain compliant with charity law.
This means, York SU Student groups can only fundraise for a Charity registered in England and Wales. (You can search the Charity Register to check this. This also means you cannot fundraise for a community interest company (CIC), trade unions, businesses, not-for-profit organisations or crowdfunding pages such as GoFundMe.
Fundraising for your Student Group
If you need to raise funds to deliver your student groups events and activities, you can also fundraise for your own cause. The following fundraising guidance will still apply, you will just need to ensure your fundraising ends up in the right place (your student group own funds account).
If you choose to fundraise for your own group, you may also want to consider utilising the University's crowdfunding platform YuStart, as you can only benefit from alumni match funding.
Once you've decided you'd like to fundraise, you've got a number of things to think about.
If you're fundraising for a charity, which one?
If you're fundraising for your group, do you have a specific cause you are trying to raise money for (such as new equipment or to deliver an event)
Would you like to host a one-off fundraising event? Or are you hoping to run a term-long fundraising appeal?
How will people donate to your cause? Will you collect donations in cash, take donations from ticket sales, or set up an online donations page?
All of these questions are different points to consider throughout the process. Once you've figured out who you're fundraising for, and what you're going to do, you can then consult the relevant points of this guide to ensure you do everything required to make your fundraiser a success.
If you're not sure where to start and need some inspiration, check out the Fundraising A-Z of ideas.
When it comes to actually raising money, you have a number of different options to consider. The different options available to you are:
Collecting cash donations is the traditional way to raise funds at events, and using collection tins or buckets are often an additional way of people throwing in their loose change to donate to your cause.
You can collect a sealed bucket from York SU Helpdesk, and then you just need to collect donations and hand in your sealed bucket back to Helpdesk after your fundraiser. Our Finance team will then count the donations and deposit into your preferred account.
Selling tickets via the York SU website is another option to raise funds.
If you want to ticket a fundraising event where all funds raised will go to charity you can set this up so the tick sales will go directly into your College Fundraising account.
If you want to set up tickets where a proportion of money raised from ticket sales go to charity, then you’ll just to need to make this clear when selling the ticket in the description, and then contact York SU Finance to transfer the funds. For example, in your event description, you will need to include some wording such as: ‘£1 from every ticket sold for xyz event goes to xyz charity’.
If your student group has a SumUp Card Reader you could use this to take contactless donations from attendees at an event. You will also need to notify anyone donating that their donation is subject to a 1.69% transaction fee from SumUp.
After the event, money raised via SumUp will be deposited into your student group own funds account. If you're fundraising for charity, you need to contact York SU Finance to instruct them to transfer the funds to your chosen charity.
York SU has a JustGiving page that Colleges and Student Groups can use to set up a page on. Any funds raised will come into York SU’s accounts and be deposited directly into your College fundraising accounts.
Check out our 'How to' guide for JustGiving on details on how to set up a JustGiving page.
Important: you will need to complete all necessary event processes for whichever event you choose to organise. These processes are the same whether you're running an ordinary event, or a fundraiser, so consult the relevant guidance documents should you need further information on planning your event.
Here are some top tips on running your fundraising event to make it a success:
Prepare yourself and other event organisers with information about the chosen charity, on why people should donate. This helps donors resonate with your cause, and understand what their money is supporting.
Don't make any promises on how donations will be used, as you can't guarantee the exact investment of the funds by the charity. However, the charity you are supporting may be able to provide guidance on what certain amounts of money can go towards (e.g. £5 will fund xyz).
You need to be clear on if fundraising profits, or fundraising proceeds will go to your cause.
Fundraising Profits - All reimbursements and expenses will be repaid from the fundraised amount, and only profit will then be donated to the chosen cause.
Fundraising Proceeds - All money raised will be donated to the chosen cause.
When donating fundraised money as part of a York SU group, you should do this centrally through the York SU Account. For example, if you pay a cash donation into York SU Finance, or setup fundraising event tickets on the York SU website, we can then pay the charity directly from our accounts after you submit a purchase or payment request.
Charities may have online giving pages you can set up and make donations to, which go directly to the charity. We'd discourage this as it may involve you handling the funds raised yourself, and you would need to report it back to us, and you'd need to ensure any page is reputable and genuine. Some exceptions would be campaigns such as Movember, where the University of York has a page with each club having sub-pages.
It's important for any fundraising that does not go through York SU's accounts, you complete the below form to let us know about your fundraising, this is a mandatory requirement due to the Union's charity status. You must not create your own GoFundMe pages to raise money for charity or your student group.
If you need further support with your fundraising, please contact York SU's Fundraising Team at fundraising@yorksu.org