Cool fencing charity tournament

[quickclay]

I just wanted to mention that our little club in northern WA raised over $1000 for a local charity by getting pledges per touch for fencers. Pretty cool way to raise donations, as well as getting people interested in learning about the sport. Almost every one of my pledges asked me about how scoring works in fencing, which led to other rule questions, etc. Good times!
Pledges generally ranged from $.25 to $2/touche.
Anyone else have any success stories about raising funds for charity via fencing?

[sabrefencer93]

That actually is a really, really really good idea. I might have to try that out for our next fundraiser! I just raised $120 for my school club by holding a charity tournament and charging entry fees. >.<

[quickclay]

I'm stoked you liked it! Please let me know if you give it a try and how it worked. One tip I'd have is to work out the "average" number of touches a fencer would score (high -low range works) because almost every pledge will ask that. For our small 16 person tournament we worked out that fencers would score between 20-40 touches on average and mentioned that in the donation request.

[sabrefencer93]

Will do, not sure when i will be doing another charity event, but i will keep this in mind. Perhaps as a school project idea.

[foibles]

I'm on the BOD for the local chamber orchestra. Every year we put together an auction. We ask local businesses to donate goods or services and we auction them off.

I donated books of 4 free fencing lessons. We auctioned off 5 books and brought in about a grand. 3 of the students have bought gear and continued to take lessons. The other two have yet to claim their prize.

http://www.fencing.net/gallery/showp...o=1533&cat=500

[quickclay]

Sounds great! Anything that brings in some new students as well as raise money for charity is pretty sweet.