Fundraising Made Simple
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Key Takeaways
- Dicksboro GAA & Camogie Club raised approximately €140,000 towards a new gym project, well past their original €100,000 target, giving a Fundraising per Member (FPM) of roughly €140, compared to the average club's sub-€10 FPM.
- Splitting one big campaign into dozens of individual team fundraising pages turned a generic club ask into personal, competitive fundraisers that players and families rallied behind, with team-level sponsorship giving local businesses a more relevant reason to get involved.
- A raffle incentive (entries for every €20 donated) encouraged supporters to give more per donation, while donating 10% to local charities widened the campaign's appeal beyond registered members to the wider community.
- Running everything through a digital fundraising platform gave the committee real-time visibility and removed manual tracking, which fuelled competition and kept oversight tight.
- A campaign of this scale is the ceiling of a club's fundraising, not something to repeat every year, recurring income should carry the load between big pushes.
What does exceptional club fundraising actually look like?
When Dicksboro GAA & Camogie Club in Kilkenny took part in ClubZap Fittest Superstars, the club set itself an ambitious goal: raise €100,000 towards a new gym project.
On 30 May,2026 they didn't just hit the target.
They passed it - raising approximately €140,000 and counting.
In my recent article on fundraising engines, I have introduced a metric we track for all ClubZap clubs: Fundraising per Member (FPM). An average club (across all sports and all parts of Ireland and the UK) sits at just under €10 / £10 per member in digitally tracked fundraising.
For context, Dicksboro has roughly 1,000 registered members. That means this single campaign generated approximately €140 per member, before counting the club's lotto or any of its other fundraising activities.
That's an exceptional result.
But the most useful lesson for other clubs isn't the final number. It's how Dicksboro structured the campaign to get there.
One Event, Dozens of Fundraising Campaigns
On the surface, ClubZap Fittest Superstars was one major club event.
Underneath, Dicksboro effectively turned it into dozens of smaller fundraisers.
Each competing team had its own fundraising page, complete with its own bio, donation button and fundraising total.
That immediately changed the dynamic.
Instead of asking the community to support one generic €100,000 club campaign, individual groups could rally behind people they knew.
Players promoted their teams. Families supported relatives and friends. Individual teams competed against each other on the fundraising leaderboard.
One enormous fundraising target became lots of smaller, more personal ones - all contributing towards the same goal.
Give Sponsors Something Tangible to Support
Dicksboro also created sponsorship opportunities around individual teams.
That's a very different proposition for a local business than simply being asked to "sponsor our fundraiser".
Businesses could associate themselves with a particular team and the people involved in it, while the club publicly recognised and thanked those sponsors throughout the campaign.
It made the sponsorship opportunity more personal and gave the club dozens of potential commercial conversations rather than relying on one headline event sponsor.
For grassroots clubs, that's an important lesson.
Sometimes the best way to increase sponsorship isn't finding a bigger sponsor. It's creating more valuable and more relevant sponsorship opportunities.
Give People a Reason to Donate More
Every €20 donated to the Dicksboro campaign also earned an entry into a raffle, with two All-Ireland final tickets and €1,000 among the prizes.
The primary reason to donate remained supporting the club.
But adding an incentive gave supporters another reason to increase their contribution.
A €5 or €10 donation suddenly had a reason to become €20.
When you're dealing with hundreds or thousands of individual donations, relatively small increases in average donation value can have a significant impact on the final total.
Make the Campaign Bigger Than the Club
The strongest model combines the three.
Recurring fundraising gives the club a dependable financial foundation.
Team fundraisers allow individual groups to fund specific requirements.
Major campaigns give the entire club the ability to mobilise around bigger ambitions when needed.
The problem arises when a club relies almost entirely on one.
If everything depends on one annual fundraiser, one disappointing event can leave a significant hole in the budget. If every financial need results in another small fundraiser, members and volunteers eventually experience fundraising fatigue.
Balance matters.
But How Much Should Your Club Actually Raise?
Another smart decision was to donate 10% of the money raised to two local charities.
That changed the nature of the campaign.
Instead of simply saying:
“Help us build our gym.”
the campaign also became an opportunity to support the wider local community.
That matters because the potential audience for a major fundraiser extends far beyond registered club members.
Former players, local residents, businesses and people with no direct connection to the teams may still want to support something that benefits their community.
Dicksboro gave them a reason to.
See What Structured Fundraising Can Do
Give every team its own fundraising page, track donations in real time, and turn one big goal into a club-wide campaign.
Everything Digital, Everything Counted
There was another less glamorous part of the campaign that mattered enormously: the infrastructure underneath it.
Every donation flowed through the club's digital fundraising platform.
That meant no envelopes of cash moving between volunteers, no manual spreadsheets tracking dozens of individual campaigns and no committee trying to work out the latest fundraising total at the end of every week.
The club could see the campaign developing in real time.
So could participants.
That visibility helped fuel the competition between teams while giving the committee proper oversight of the money being raised.
For a campaign of this scale, that's not simply convenient. It's essential.
Structure Makes Volunteer Effort Go Further
None of this means raising €140,000 was easy.
Dicksboro had incredibly committed volunteers and an engaged community behind the campaign. No software or fundraising structure replaces that.
What the structure did was multiply the impact of that effort.
Individual fundraising pages created ownership.Team leaderboards created competition.
Team sponsorship created more opportunities for businesses.
The raffle increased the incentive to give.
The charity element broadened the audience.
Digital fundraising made everything measurable.
Each component reinforced the others.
Big Campaigns Are the Ceiling, Not the Foundation
There's one important caveat to Dicksboro's success.
You can't run a €140,000 campaign every year.
Major fundraisers ask a lot from volunteers, sponsors, members and the wider community. Attempting to recreate that level of intensity every season is a quick route to fundraising fatigue.
The best clubs therefore don't treat campaigns like Fittest Superstars as their everyday fundraising engine.
They build reliable recurring income underneath them and save the big community push for moments when the club has a genuinely ambitious goal.
Dicksboro demonstrates what's possible at the top end of grassroots fundraising.
The lesson isn't simply to think bigger.
It's to build a structure capable of turning your club's ambition, volunteer effort and community support into something much bigger than any of those could achieve alone.
Got questions? We've got answers!
How did Dicksboro GAA raise €140,000?
They ran one major campaign, ClubZap Fittest Superstars, but structured it as dozens of individual team fundraising pages rather than one generic club-wide ask, which drove personal engagement and friendly competition between teams.
What is Dicksboro's Fundraising per Member (FPM)?
How did the raffle incentive help the campaign?
Should every club aim to run a campaign this big?
Which Club Fundraisers Give the Best Return on Volunteer Time?
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How Dicksboro GAA Raised €140,000 from One Fundraising Campaign
How one club raised €140,000 from a single fundraising campaign, and what other clubs can learn...