The vacations are a time of giving, with many individuals worldwide exchanging presents with their family members. Nonetheless, some households in your group could battle to offer presents for his or her children. A vacation donation drive often is the excellent resolution to those households’ wants.
Your group can unfold the vacation cheer this 12 months by organizing a toy drive. Giving underprivileged youngsters vacation presents is a superb strategy to give again to your group. This information offers a toy donation drive guidelines and suggestions for making your drive profitable.
What You’ll Want
Organizing a profitable toy drive takes cautious planning. Use this guidelines to make sure you have every thing you want to your group’s marketing campaign.
A Drop-Off Location
One of many important belongings you’ll want to your toy donation drive is a drop-off location for the toys. You’ll additionally want receptacles to put toys in and indicators figuring out them as donation bins.
A Technique to Promote Your Toy Drive
Getting the phrase out about your toy donation drive to as many individuals as doable is crucial. Your promoting strategies may rely in your group’s wants and attain.
A Wishlist
It may be useful to offer donors some path in what toys can be finest to donate to your drive. You may wish to create a guidelines or registry donors can decide from as they buy groceries.
Individuals to Assist
Volunteers are essential to creating any donation drive run easily. You’ll want individuals to assist in all kinds of areas, together with:
- Planning the drive
- Promoting
- Gathering toys
- Wrapping objects
- Delivering presents
Storage for the Toys
After you have all of your donations, you’ll want someplace safe to retailer the toys earlier than your volunteers wrap them.
A Technique to Distribute Toys
You’ll additionally have to coordinate just a few volunteers to distribute the toys earlier than the vacations. Schedule your toy supply far sufficient earlier than the vacations to forestall last-minute scrambling.
Deal with Particular Age Teams
Some toy donation drives are open to toys for any age group. Whereas this could be extra versatile to your donors, it may be useful to slender your focus to at least one age group or a spread, like children in first via third grade. Retaining your toy drive focused on a restricted age vary provides donors extra path in procuring and prevents purchases that don’t match your recipients’ pursuits.
It’s additionally essential to inform donors which age teams your toy drive will deal with. A well-meaning donor may convey a procuring cart filled with child toys, however they’ll be no assist in case your centered age vary is center faculty.

Promote
Unfold the phrase about your toy donation drive by promoting as typically and early as doable. In case your goal donors are individuals inside your group or enterprise, you may use an organization-wide marketing campaign to succeed in your viewers. For those who’re promoting your toy drive to the broader group, you’ll have to promote extra broadly.
Think about using a social media technique to let individuals find out about your upcoming toy drive. There are various free social media instruments for nonprofits to make use of of their promoting campaigns.
It’s also possible to put up bodily flyers and discuss to native companies in your group. You could possibly persuade just a few firms to supply reductions and coupons to encourage donations.
Use an On-line Wishlist
Utilizing a wishlist to your toy drive could assist information donors as they store. Whenever you create a wishlist to your vacation donation drive, you possibly can guarantee your group receives donations that do probably the most good for recipients.
Your group could create a web-based wishlist and share the hyperlink with donors. Begin by itemizing the toys your donation recipients may need primarily based on age and gender. You might use generic names or discover particular manufacturers to incorporate in your listing.
Use a web-based fundraising platform like GiveSmart to make your wishlist accessible. Log in to your admin web site and add objects by selecting “+New Merchandise” on the high of the display. Then fill out essential data on every merchandise, so donors know what to get. Choose “Donate” because the merchandise sort and fill within the value. When you’ve created your on-line toy drive wishlist, donors can entry it via your web page’s objects tab.
Create a Aim
One other useful technique for benefiting from your toy donation drive is making a purpose for the hassle. Defining a purpose for the drive provides your group and donors a exact end line and milestones alongside the best way. A transparent goal may encourage donors to offer further to fulfill the goal donation quantity.
When holding monitor of your fundraising purpose, take into account utilizing GiveSmart’s fundraising software program. We make it simple to maintain monitor of fundraising objectives and progress on-line utilizing a progress thermometer. The software program will replace the purpose’s progress with every donation so you possibly can share it along with your donors.
Arrange Assortment Areas
You’ll additionally want to decide on assortment areas to your toy drive donations. For those who’re internet hosting the drive inside what you are promoting, group, or faculty, choose an space accessible to all members or staff. Clearly mark the gathering location for the vacation donation drive.
For those who’re organizing a public toy drive, you might have to associate with different organizations to arrange a number of handy areas to succeed in extra donors. Nonetheless, having a number of drop-off spots means your group can have extra to handle. Do not forget that you’ll have to periodically acquire the toys and retailer them securely earlier than wrapping them.
Distribute the Toys
With each different component in place, you’re prepared to your toy drive! After donors have introduced of their presents, the final step is to wrap and distribute the toys to the youngsters. Your technique for delivering your donations will depend upon the recipients you selected to your drive and your group’s capabilities.
You may distribute toys to households earlier than the vacations by dropping them off at particular areas or having relations decide up their presents. No matter technique you employ, get volunteers in on the motion to allow them to see the rewards of their efforts.
Handle Your Toy Drive With GiveSmart

Organizing a toy drive requires loads of planning, however the impression is effectively definitely worth the effort. In case your group needs to make its toy donation drive the most effective it may be, utilizing fundraising software program is usually a highly effective technique for fulfillment. At GiveSmart, we perceive your nonprofit or group has distinctive wants for managing its fundraisers, which is why we developed our fundraising resolution with versatile options to assist your efforts.
GiveSmart’s industry-leading fundraising platform permits donor administration, donation monitoring, on-line fundraising, and marketing campaign administration capabilities. Our instruments and 24/7 customer support give your group the assist it must additional its mission and create a extra important impression. To see what GiveSmart can do to your group’s toy drive this vacation season, request a demo at the moment.