Apart from one round of begging emails to friends and clients, my fundraising has all been via donations on my website and forum, along with any advertising revenue from the sites. We were initially going to try yardsales and fundraising parties, but so far things are looking quite good as it is and I’m quite close to the target £2650, but of course it will be nice to make more.
Luckily the main site seems to be quite popular, I have plenty of jazz and saxophone tutorials which unlike many comparable online resources, are available free of charge, but I do of course suggest that donations for the fundraising are welcome.
“Sampleaid” is working particularly well. This is where I make my own custom made working audio files available. Many music producers have such a library which they have built up over the years, and are usually a jealously guarded personal unique resource, and mine was no exception until last year when I decicded to make part of it available via downloads and CDs in order to help with the fundraising. I set up a “Sample Aid” paypal account so the funds can be kept away from my own business earnings and all the income can go straight to APEC.
The saxophone instruction DVDs are also selling very well, but I have to buy these from the producer so can only donate the profits to the fund. They are also available from Amazon and various other on and offline retail outlets so I have a bit of competition with those.
The UK Saxophone Teachers directory is not doing so well. I thought that this would attract more applicants than it has. I’ve raised a small amount with it, but realised that it needs a lot more publicity and work getting it networked via other online directories. I won’t give up on this, but because of the amount of work it will have to wait until after the Peru Trek.