Hat Drive FAQs

At your office, place of business, schools, youth groups, churches, in your own neighborhood, on your own social media site, really…the sky’s the limit! Any place that is interested in giving back and helping the childhood cancer community is where you can hold a hat drive!

Holding an Ellie’s Hats drive at a school provides a great way for students of all grade levels, to give back to their communities! We highly encourage children to be actively involved in all aspects of the hat drive. If your child wants to hold one at their school, start with your child’s principal. With our experience, having your child, with your support, go in to the school and present this idea to the principal is a great way to introduce what your child is trying to do. The principal can then direct you and your child from there. In some schools, the principal encourages a club or student organization to support the hat drive to help make it a big success.

As an added benefit to your child, they might be able to receive credit hours for their community service.

We can supply sample flyers that you can use for your hat drive. Also, if your child is involved, we encourage you to let the children create as much of the material as possible! Using the sample flyer, you can tailor all pertinent details and information to your specific hat drive. Along with flyers, posters can be made and posted where the hat drive is being held. The flyers can be posted on social media, and e-mailed out to the list of people that you are trying to reach, i.e. church members, school communities, websites, etc. We have found that using social media has been a huge success for many of our hat drives, so get those Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts going!

• Hats that a child would LOVE to wear
• The hats need to be new with a tag
• The typical age for children that need hats are 3-16 years old

Hats should be new and not worn, since these hats will be going to children with cancer.

We have had several different methods used during our hat drives. If you are holding a hat drive at a particular location or locations, have a bin set up at each location. We can send you a logo to put on your bin, or we have had many children decorate the bin! Boxes, plastic bins, etc have all been used. Whatever you want to do to draw attention to it is great! Also, if you are holding a hat drive in your community, we have had several people just leave a labeled bin on their front porch for people to just drop off the hats at their own convenience!

When possible we would like to have your hat drive benefit your local community! If you have a specific location that you are interested in donating the hats to you can let us know and we will contact them. Since the hats will be coming from Ellie’s Hats we do ask that the hats collected are sent to us and we will go through them and send them to the location you selected. If you don’t have a specific location in your community, then you can send them to us. We can send you a shipping label.

Along with hats to donate, we need to have the resources for things like shipping and operating costs! Any monetary donation is appreciated, and Target gift cards are also appreciated! (Visit our Donation Page on our website for more information).

You can also ask your local businesses if they would like to become a sponsor of Ellie’s Hats. We are an official 501 (c) (3) Charitable Organization!

We can supply sample flyers that you can use for your hat drive. Also, if your child is involved, we encourage you to let the children create as much of the material as possible! Using the sample flyer, you can tailor all pertinent details and information to your specific hat drive. Along with flyers, posters can be made and posted where the hat drive is being held. The flyers can be posted on social media, and e-mailed out to the list of people that you are trying to reach, i.e. church members, school communities, websites, etc. We have found that using social media has been a huge success for many of our hat drives, so get those Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts going!

It’s completely up to you! You know that people will see your hat drive, and want to participate, but may forget about it in their hectic life! So holding a hat drive for a window of time, like two weeks or a month, with a set due-date, seems to be the most successful. A few reminders may need to go out, but it’ll be worth it to help the hat drive be successful!

It’s completely up to you! You know that people will see your hat drive, and want to participate, but may forget about it in their hectic life! So holding a hat drive for a window of time, like two weeks or a month, with a set due-date, seems to be the most successful. A few reminders may need to go out, but it’ll be worth it to help the hat drive be successful!

No! It can be a small event or a large event. It’s completely up to you! And it doesn’t take much time to get one started. A flyer, an email, and posting on social media are the basics in starting a hat drive. Whatever the number of hats collected, your efforts are appreciated! We want you to feel successful. Please let us know how we can help!