I have two passions outside of my home life: radio & car shows. Most of my time is spent voicing, writing and/or producing radio imaging. But in my spare time, while still thinking about ideas for radio imaging, I’m showing my Camaro at a car show.

Most car shows are fund raisers for local churches, schools or other organizations. They make their money from registration fees, 50/50 raffles, and auctions. Auctions rely on donations of items that are of value to the participants & attendees. But acquiring these items can be burdensome. Just as a radio station may deal with a record company or an artist’s management to obtain, for example, a signed guitar, event organizers may reach out to the auto manufacturers for licensed apparel or accessories to varying degrees of success.

As I got more involved in my local car club and witnessed their efforts to collect items like these, I saw an opportunity to create something of value, unique to the event, that would be relatively inexpensive to do and raise a lot of money in the process.

As I’ve become more adept at graphic design, I started to experiment with digital artwork. In 2017, I made 6 prints for our annual club car show, The Fall Classic, featuring each of the 6 generations of Camaro along with our club logo. I bought some 2-for-1 frames at Michaels and voila! I had 6 unique items for our Chinese auction.

When our club president saw these, he had an idea. He immediately reached out to GM to find out who from Chevrolet might be coming to our event. Since we would have some Camaro design team members on-site, he had them sign the prints and used them in our live auction. For an initial investment of less that $50 and a few hours of my time, we raised over $500.

In radio, we host fund raising events regularly. So why not create something of value, unique to that event, that could never be duplicated? Think about your annual radiothons, guitar pulls, summer festivals and winter warm-ups we do. We all create logos for these events; event t-shirts and posters for souvenir sales as well. Why not set a few aside to be autographed by artists or your airstaff to create a one-of-a-kind collectable for someone to display in their office or gameroom?

Check out the gallery of things I’ve done for some inspiration. And don’t hesitate to call on me for a little creative help. I’m always at the ready to serve the love of my life, radio. (just don’t tell my wife… or my car that I wrote that last part. Shhhh!)