Door to Door for Donations

When I was a senior in high school, my friends and I decided that we would like to do something charitable as a group. Considering many of us are Christians, we thought that it would be a good idea to do a Christian organization. Eventually, we settled on sponsoring an underprivileged child through World Vision. World Vision is an organization who pairs families up with an underprivileged youth in an impoverished country. Once we settled on this, we wanted to figure out a way to fund the monthly sponsor payments. We thought that going door to door asking for donations would be a good idea. So that’s exactly what we did. We made an informational poster and carried around a bucket for money. I was doing most of the pitching. We decided to solicit areas that we knew had a lot of older residents. We assumed that they would be more willing to hear about our cause and consider donating. We hit around 50 houses and ended up doing pretty well. Overall we raised a little over 300 dollars via cash and Venmo. It was a really great experience. Some of the rejection we faced was pretty harsh. It was really important that we learned how to have a short memory of our failures. I found that people wanted to know less about us and our idea, and more about the organization than we originally anticipated. They were primarily concerned with the legitimacy of World Vision. I was surprised on how well trusting people were of a couple 18 year old kids. Like I said, they were much more skeptical and curious about the mission of the organization. Overall, soliciting door to door gave me super valuable face to face interactions with prospective customers. It forced me to be sharp and personable, and at times have a short memory.