Student Group Fundraising Guide

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.

1.  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.

2. 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.

When it comes to actually raising money, you have a number of different options to consider. The different options available to you are:

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.

Making the Charity Donation

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.