A Fundraising Thermometer Can Help You Earn A Lot Of Money

A fundraising thermometer is an easy and fun gadget to help you make progress on your fundraiser goals. By creating a visual representation of what you hope to accomplish, you’ll be pushed to realize and will reach that goal very quickly!

So what is it? Well, you may have driven into a small town and seen a large thermometer along the side of the road, showing their progress toward raising money for an important civil project. Sometimes they’re at schools helping monitor a sports team’s progress toward new equipment. You can even find people who use them as measures of progress towards an individual goal like saving up for a class trip, buying a gift for a loved one, or an annual charitable donation.

Their power arises from those same savings lessons we were taught when we were young. We’d come running home to ask our parents for something new. Mom, I wish a new shirt. Dad, can you get me a car? But our parents were smart and told us to put away our allowance – to save! The process of saving that money helped motivate us, and pushed us to save more money.

The same basic idea underlies one of these thermometers. As a group, the goal is to raise some money to realize a goal. By creating a visual representation of that goal, we’re more motivated to reach it. Instinctively, we want to see that picture colored all the way up to the top. And as we fill in increasingly of the picture by raising more and more money, we’re driven to persevere.

Well, that determination our parents taught us also works for our adult individual or group goals. By looking up and seeing our steps toward achieving a goal, we see our efforts get us nearer to to our goal. And making advancement to that goal pushes us – we want to finish, to achieve, and raise the money.

If you are going to create one at home, it’s actually quite simple. Yes, it will involve some drawing, but it’s pretty simple drawing. First, acquire some poster board or some butcher’s paper. Laying out the paper in a portrait format, you’re going to draw a tall, thin rectangular shape. Towards the top end of the rectangle, turn that straight end into a rounded end (now the top looks like a hot dog). On the bottom end (the straight end) you draw a large circle. Now you’ve got the basic thermometer shape. In the body, make marks showing the increments you will use to measure your progress. To make use of your drawing, get yourself a red marker and color in when you make progress towards your goal. You know you’re done when it’s all red (or better, when you’ve beat your goal and the red is shooting out of the top).

You can even find companies offering pre-made fundraising thermometers making it that much easier to get started. Whether on your own hand-drawn poster, or coloring in one that’s professionally made, you’ll quickly be on your way to raising money for your important cause.