First Fundraiser: Car Wash

This weekend the Morocco Team had their first major fundraiser, that is a fundraiser where the students organized it and prepared for it. The fundraiser was a car wash and was actually postponed once, so this was the rain date. It was a major success! We raised over $895 and plan on having two more car wash fundraisers the coming weekends.

We all arrived around 9:30 am and the fundraiser started at 10:00 am and cars immediately started coming in. Car after car almost non-stop until around 10:30 where there was a little break. At this point Mr. Steedman told us we had already raised about $130, which was a great start. After that point there were absolutely no breaks, the cars kept on coming and there were somewhat of backups. The parking lot became overflowed at some points. It was such a major success and everyone had fun while doing it.

During the car wash I did many jobs, and so did everyone else. There were a few picked students that went on main anad south street with signs saying "free car wash," but most of us worked in the parking lot either scrubbing, rinsing or drying the cars. I think almost everyone did every job, at least I know I did. More importantly, I didn't see one person stick to one job, just in the beginning when there were less jobs and less people helping were there more strict jobs. For a while there were just two or three people using the hoses and the scrubbers and dryers would do both scrubbing and drying. I believe I did my best and tried my hardest during the car wash. I scrubbed, dried, and rinsed the cars and only stopped once or twice to get a sip of water. I really wanted to keep helping and keep the cars going, and I didn't want the people to get irritated and leave because we were taking to long. Also, the main reason I didn't volunteer to help out with the signs is because I feel like I could do a lot better and more helping to clean the cars. Overall, I think I did my best and can't wait for the car washes coming up.

One thing I could probably improve upon is maybe go out of my comfort zone or challenge myself in working with the signs. Although I don't think I would be good at all in drawing people in, I'm more of a quiet, hard-working person than talking and forcing or making people go to the car wash (I'm not good at forcing people to do things and think that they just don't care). If a person doesn't come it will make me think that they don't care and make me feel disappointed and want to give up, I most likely will think that there's someone way better that can do this job a hundred times better than me. Maybe instead I can work on talking to the customers while cleaning their cars, like if their outside of their car or something and maybe that will make them more generous to donate more money.

One thing that could be improved upon could be making sure that all of the customers have been spoken to about what we're trying to do here, what cause the donations are going to, and why they should donate; in other words to convince them to donate and tell a little more about what we're doing to help spread the word. I think that there were a lot of cars that weren't spoken to probably because we didn't know if they were spoken to or not. There were a couple of times where we asked each other if the person or persons had given a donation already. Also, even with our success there were a lot of cars that didn't give any donation which could be partly because we didn't talk to them. Something else we could work on is making sure what step the car is at in the car wash, I remember a few times we didn't know if the car had been rinsed the first or second time.

For the coming up car washes we plan to be in multiple places, have more supplies, and hopefully raise more money. We had a great idea and have the ability to have car washes in different places. For example, Vani, a fellow student, knows someone or her father works at a fire station and offered to let us host a car wash at the fire station. So there could be two places in the same day where we could have car wash fundraisers. Two times more the probability of raising double the money. It's a great idea, and there wil definitely need to be more supplies if we have two different car washes. One flaw with our car wash was that we kept running out of towels. The towels became drenched fast, it took forever for them to dry, and there was no place to dry them. We had to bring out chairs to dry some towels, but even after that it took an extreme amount of time for the towels to dry. So at the next fundraisers a student or a couple of students volunteered to bring in some sort of drying racks for the towels.