There may be a time when your committee is organising your fete where you realise you need a bit of specialist help!

It is vital to determine the abilities of everyone in your team (or potential team!) as early as possible so you can identify what sort of capacity you have at your disposal, and where your gaps are.

When you are allocating your workload, your first port of call is your own community – members of your school or club. It is best to be specific in your ‘cry for help’. ‘We need a graphic designer to design our poster and flyer etc for the fete’ is a good start.  ‘Anyone with web design skills who can help us put our fete website together?’ is also helpful.  There will hopefully be somebody out there who will swoop in and save the day!

If you don’t have any luck with your fellow parents, you could ask a local business to donate their time and expertise. A local printer, for example, may have a graphic designer they can spare in exchange for a sponsorship deal.

As a last resort you can look at outsourcing it.

This can be a straightforward as calling in a local contractor and paying market rates (however always ask for a discount in return for sponsorship!), but you can also get a bit fancy because we live in the ‘Age of Technology’.

If you require services that can be performed remotely, there are freelancing websites that enable you to post your job description.  Applicants, usually based overseas, will then ‘bid’ for the job, providing their CV or examples of their work for you to view.

Examples of these sites are:

• Odesk.com
• Elance.com
• 99designs.com

Work such as copywriting, graphic design, web design and drafting press releases are most suited to this model, which often works out to be a fraction of the cost of a local supplier.  When you are in the fundraising game, every cent matters!