The art of fundraising

Coolbellup’s Bob Minson speaks to Chris Egan

For every community football club, the ability to remain financial is one of the great challenges that is faced by every committee year in, year out.

It was no different for the Coolbellup Football Club who upon their establishment, were keen to ensure that the club would be one of the most financial in the local area.

Proving that the most simple of ideas can be the ones that produce the best results, one of the architects behind the formation of the Coolbellup Football Club, Bob Minson, saw the power of a raffle in the community as being a way to raise much needed funds.

“Hotels used to have a session, two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon and we used to run a raffle every Sunday at the Coolbellup Hotel,” Minson said.

“It was a box, one week it was meat and vegies, next week crayfish and crabs and next week something like that, in those days it was 20c a ticket or five for a dollar and we used to make 100 bucks out of that and that was the main income for the club in the early stages, just had a little raffle.”

While the idea was simple, the success was built on the dedication and commitment of Minson to the idea. For over five years, Minson and his wife would be at the Coolbellup Hotel every Sunday, running their raffle and delivering much needed funds to the Coolbellup Football Club.

Over his time involved in the club, Minson, alongside his wife would continue to promote the power of fundraising and the power of running raffles to keep the club financial.

Moving on from the box raffles, the Coolbellup Football Club would have some of the most noteworthy prizes and club raffles going around.

“We had other raffles, colour TV’s and cars, things like that, but that was the main income, we did that for years,” Minson said.

Even today, like the club’s founders, the committee of the Coolbellup Football Club is still looking for innovative ideas to help grow the clubs financial base.

Coolbellup are one of the Perth Football Clubs who have started a fundraising portal online with the Australian Sports Foundation, one of the most recognised ways to fundraise in modern times. As they did back in the early days, Coolbellup still understands its importance as a community club.

Originally it was the community that was helping support a team and a club, now as their Australian Sports Foundation page outlines, Coolbellup is about giving back to its own community. By being a club that caters for families in the local community, including those who come from an indigenous or disadvantaged background.

While for a large part of Coolbellup’s history, Minson was a lone voice on the fundraising initiatives, he still believes that if more people involved with clubs could see the value of having more people individually invested, clubs could thrive ever more.

“It is surprisingly hard to keep an amateur football club front up every Saturday,” Minson said.

“If a lot of people realised how hard it was, I think we could get a lot more out of them.”