Message In A Bottle Adoption Fundraiser

Written by Erin Vogtman from onesoughtme.blogspot.com and re-posted here with permission.

“We’re adopting!” Read all about it in the message in the bottle! This is an idea for announcing an adoption and for kicking off a coin drive fundraiser. We have seen where people use baby bottles to collect coins for various fundraisers, but we don’t know the age of the children we will be matched with, so a baby bottle just didn’t quite fit. We decided to use a juice bottle for a coin drive fundraiser.

Most of our friends and family already knew our news about adopting from Ethiopia, but some non-internet folks still hadn’t heard. We took the juice bottles to our adult Sunday school class to announce the news of our adoption and as a kick off to our coin drive fundraiser. We’ve also been passing them out to friends at the kids’ dance class, local businesses we frequent, and friends at work. We posted it on our Facebook page that connects to the Google doc so that if someone is so inspired, they can print off the bottle label and start collecting coins!

The bottles read, “Change the life of a Child” then it says, “Help us bring little Vogtmans home. Ethiopian Adoption. Thank you!” and gives our blog site address. The ‘message’ part of the bottle is our ‘business card’ that we printed from Vistaprint that basically says our names and blog site so that people can read and learn more about us and this journey to adopt.

Instructions for friends/family who aren’t local. Here is the link to our label. Click it, print it, affix it to a jar, and save your change! After about a month, count it, deposit it, and donate to us by clicking our ‘donate’ button on the right side of our home page! Don’t forget the great big THANK YOU from our family and our future kiddos coming to their forever family!!!

A Few Tips For Your Adoption Fundraiser

Baby bottles are cute, but the cheapest we could find were $1 a piece. These 10 oz. juice bottles were $.50 a piece per unit sold in a six pack. When trying to save all you can for adoption funds, the 1/2 price of the juice bottles beat the cuteness of the baby bottles. Just make sure the juice bottle opening is wide enough for a quarter to fit into the bottle. These are the Walmart brand apple juice containers.
We poured the juice into a pitcher, washed the containers, and tore off the original labels to use it’s size as a template for creating our own label. A little cutting, a little tape, and we were good to go.
We plan on running the coin drive for about a month. It’s good to set an end goal. Then we are “calling all coins” to collect the bottles. We made a running list of everyone who has a bottle just to keep track and be sure we let them know when we are collecting. This will help enable us to send thank you cards to everyone involved in supporting us as well.

Follow the Vogtman’s adoption journey at onesoughtme.blogspot.com

photo credit: dans le grand bleu via photopin cc