Are you currently planning a corporate fundraiser? Are you trying to figure out how to get your donors to contribute more money? Raising awareness, even among people who are already contributing to your event, can be a challenge. Here are some simple ways to engage with the audience and to keep the money flowing in for your favorite charity:

Offer bottled water: But not just any bottled water. Your guests are going to get thirsty while participating, so why not sell or give away water that has custom bottle labels on it? These should be branded with your company name, the fundraiser's name, and the date. You should also add a website and QR code that the guests can visit on their cell phones. Throughout the night and for the next week or two, update this website with a running total of all the money that's been raised so far. The website need not be anything fancy, so you don't have to invest a large portion of the fundraising budget into its creation. But watching the total go higher can help to inspire some of your more reluctant donors to gift higher dollar amounts.

Sell a collectible item or items: If you are selling the water with custom bottle labels on it, encourage people to buy more water by having multiple label designs. When your guests buy a bottle of water, it will be blindly pulled from a cooler or dispensed from a soda machine. Each individual bottle should have one of five or six different labels on it, with some labels being fewer in number than other labels. Once one of each label is collected, he or she can present them to you to be entered in a raffle for a fancy gift basket or other large prize. This will make the purchase of raffle tickets more exciting. Guests who might not otherwise have purchased raffle tickets can get in on the fun of trying to collect all the labels they need.

Avoid obvious choices in gift bags: Pens are easily lost or forgotten. Shirts can quickly run out in the correct sizes, leaving you with too many as leftovers after your event. Instead, use label stickers to personalize things that don't ordinarily get given away as promotional items. For example, if you can find an inexpensive supplier of novelty staplers, affix label stickers to each one that has the same info displayed on your custom bottle labels. Since most employees will probably need to use a stapler now and then, they are less likely to forget about the charity in question or to throw away the stapler that you give them. 

For professional help manufacturing custom labels for your event, check out websites like http://www.northwestlabel.com/.