Dining for Dollars (D4$) is a fundraiser where members and friends of Neighborhood Unitarian-Universalist Church (NUUC) host dinners, parties, and other food-oriented entertainments, and the church auctions off the seats at the table. Each seat at the table is auctioned individually. This creates a mix of people, and is a great opportunity to meet other folks in the church by either bidding (successfully) on events or hosting one.
From 2004, D4$ has raised over $170,000 for Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church.
The Dining for Dollars fundraiser was an offshoot of the auction fundraisers at Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church in Pasadena CA. Members who had no goods to donate, would offer to host a dinner or other event to support the church. So many folks would volunteer these dinners, that eventually they were moved into their own event, and Dining for Dollars was born.
When I took over the event, all the information was handled either manually or by spreadsheets, which made the execution of the event a bit of a challenge. Being a bit of a geek, I had a lot of fun putting the information into a database, then designing database, then redesigning the database over successive iterations. As you might guess, I am not a database professional – I had the cart in front of the horse from the beginning!
Over the past few years, I have provided copies of our materials (bid books, bid sheets, etc.) to other churches that have initiated their own Dining for Dollars events. Up to now, I have not shared the database that I use to administer our fundraiser. However, FileMaker has a solution that allows the database to be compiled into a standalone application that no longer requires FileMaker to run. The “runtime” applications are portable and make the sharing of the database with others feasible, and more importantly in the world of nonprofit organizations like churches, affordable.
So when my close friend, Nancy Rose, volunteered to set up a Dining for Dollars fundraiser for her Rhode Island congregation, I used that as motivation to transition my database into a standalone application that I could share with her and others.
Neighborhood Church member Gillian Symonds designed the original Dining for Dollars logo – I merely substituted the current Unitarian-Universalist logo into the design included in the database.
Link to sample bid booklet/list of events (.pdf, 0.2 MB)
Link to Fundraiser/database manual (.pdf, 1 MB)
Click to download standalone D4$ database (.zip, 63MB, Mac OS X only)
Requires FileMakerPro application to run - file should be usable with either Mac or Windows versions: Click to download FileMakerPro D4$ database (.zip, 1.9 MB)