We ran across an article the other day that was encouraging. It talked about activity based fundraisers like walks and runs and how they had set new fundraising records in 2011.

For the past few years there’s been lots of talk of the decline in product fundraising. The main reason given time after time has been childhood obesity. Schools and large organizations started to move away from food products that had been a staple in the fundraising industry for them and were seeing declines in the amount of money they raised.

Is it possible these smaller groups could learn from these large organizations and the amounts of money they are raising?

The other interesting thing about the list below is that they are almost all adult organizations with adult participants:

The top ten programs by total gross revenue in 2011 were:

1 $415.0 million (-0.4%) Relay for Life American Cancer Society

2 $131.3 million ( 7.7%) Race for the Cure Susan G. Komen for the Cure

3 $105.0 million ( 2.6%) March for Babies March of Dimes

4 $ 99.1 million ( 9.7%) Heart Walk American Heart Association

5 $ 87.5 million (-9.8%) Team in Training Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

6 $ 85.7 million (-0.4%) Walk to Cure Diabetes Juvenile Diabetes Research Fndn

7 $ 84.4 million (-5.4%) Susan G. Komen 3-Day Susan G. Komen for the Cure

8 $ 82.4 million (-0.8%) Bike MS National MS Society

9 $ 61.4 million ( 7.0%) Jump Rope for Heart American Heart Association

10 $ 61.0 million ( 1.7%) Making Strides Against Breast Cancer American Cancer Society

So if you want to raise money don’t be afraid of thon type events.