This and all the pages regarding fund-raising initiatives are composed in part or entirely by young volunteers who have actually done the given project successfully. The authors simply want to share their experience, and it is general advice only; Trailblazers takes no responsibility for private initiatives, nor claims any percentage from those who find these ideas helpful.

Fundraiser Name: Bottle Drive

Expected Income: $100-$200 per person per drive.

People Needed: Minimum 3: At least one driver and a pair to work together. As many drivers and pairs can be gathered as you like and are able.

 Materials Needed:

• Car. If space is a question, think mini-van or van.
• Plastic bags, like trash bags: each person needs one. When full, one will need another plastic bag. Buying a box of trash bags at the store would be most prudent.
• A map of the neighborhood where you plan to go, so you can plan routes. This type of planning is important if there will be more than one team, to donors aren’t pestered with the same group coming to the door twice in one afternoon.
• Highly Recommended: It’s good to make a simple flier which will be used to let people know that you’ll be coming. Who you are, what you’re doing, and when you will come are all great. It’s OK to put one of the parent’s phone numbers on the flier. Just seeing it there will make the reader more receptive to the legitimacy of your enterprise.
• Optional: Walkie-Talkies. If there are, for example, three or four teams working, they’ll fill up their bags, then they can call the driver to find them and drop off the full bag taking a new one.
• Optional: hand wipes. You’ll be handling open cans which people may have drunken out of. Hygiene is not an expensive endeavor, gels and wipes are easy to find and cheap.

The time questions:

• When and How Long: It will take a whole afternoon. Take a Saturday with your friends, and try to work from lunch to dinner. It will pay off, it’s worth the time!
• Time to plan the route you and your teams will follow. This route will be used both for distributing the fliers one week and collecting the bottles the next.
• You will also need a shorter afternoon the week before for the same territory (see the first point under “method” below).
• Remember it will take you quite some time to process all those cans at the grocery store after you made the collection. It might be wise to talk with the store manager before processing 2000 cans all at once, in case there are any limitations of amounts or capacities of can-counting machines, should they have one.
• Frequency: If one does it once a month, and one manages to get $200 or so each time, it could be $1200-$2400 in a year. 

Location:

• It is most profitable to do this event in more affluent neighborhoods. More cans, and they’re more inclined to let them go, as poorer families count on their returnables.
• If you aren’t going DIRECTLY to the grocery store to process your cans.
  

Method:

• Pick an area and pass out fliers a week before, to let people know that the Trailblazers will be around next week to collect bottles. It will warm them up to the idea, and many are even disposed to put their bottles out where you can get them if they’re not going to be home.
• Study the map with your helpers, and make a route. Write on the map, go ahead: you can always get another one, and it’s an important tool of your work.