[This blog was originally posted on July 27, 2015.]
Well, that was fun.
For a while, we at Priority 1 had toyed with the idea of holding a t-shirt fundraiser. We hear pretty often from teams who come to New York City — particularly the groups who come in the non-summer months — that they would be interested in buying a Priority 1 shirt. The problem is, for an organization that tries to keep our overhead as low as possible, we don’t have a lot of capital to purchase a large number of shirts to keep on hand. And, we don’t really have much space to keep 500 t-shirts in the ministry’s apartment in the Bronx.
Then we discovered the fundraiser site Booster.com, which allowed us to design and promote our shirt without spending a dime. We didn’t have to spend a single dollar up front. We only spent what our staff, individually, purchased in shirts for themselves. So all we had to do was promote the fundraiser and see how it went.
We praise God for a successful campaign! We did our best to keep the fundraiser in front of people’s eyes, we hope without being annoying. And wow, did you come through! I figured we’d make three or four hundred bucks from the thing, and we set what we thought was a reasonable goal of 50 shirts…
Total number of shirts sold: 89
Total money raised: $1758
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. ~Ephesians 3:20-1 (ESV)
We were blown away by the support we received. So, to those who purchased shirts and/or simply donated money, THANK YOU!!! Your support was an incredible encouragement to us.
Some of the donations were designated for particular purposes, and we will honor those requests. For the rest of it, we will do two main things:
1. Buy more t-shirts. Wait, what? We will use some of the funds to purchase some shirts that we can keep for teams who come to the Bronx, something we have always wanted to do but never could justify the “investment.”
2. Zimbabwe. We’ll use some of the funds to go towards Priority 1’s trip to Zimbabwe in September. We’ll put it towards the cost of sending two staff members on the trip and towards building materials needed for a renovation project.
So wear that shirt proudly! And once again, we are extremely grateful for all of your support. Thank you.
