Have Your Best Fundraiser / How to Increase School Fundraiser Participation
Most schools rely on fundraisers to generate the revenue for their projects and events. As tax revenues change from year to year, some schools actually have to raise money for things that are normally included in the school budget! Fundraising events are great ways for schools to raise money and accomplish their goals.
However, many times fundraising is taken to the extreme and due to huge or unrealistic fundraising goals or due to ineffective fundraising events, parents and communities are inundated with fundraising drive after fundraising drive which wears them down. It’s a downward driving spiral that ends up with schools making less and less with each fundraiser. Without active and enthusiastic participation, however, fundraisers cannot succeed.
So, as school leaders, there are certain strategies that can be employed to change the situation and ensure successful fundraising efforts. Here are a few ideas to help you maximize parent and student participation in your school fundraisers:
1. Limit the Number of Product Sales Per Year. Like anything else, you don’t want too much of a good thing. Realize that most parents have other children involved in other non-profit groups, that are also doing product sale fundraisers. Families only have so much of a budget for this sort of thing. Be considerate in your planning.
2. Explain the Reason for the Fundraiser. It’s hard to get motivated if you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing. In the information that goes home to parents, make sure you are making a strong argument for this fundraiser. Even if the revenue from the program you choose goes into the “general fund”, I would still give it a name and a purpose of something already approved in the budget. Make it something that parents can really get behind- something visible and popular, like a long-established field trip or a popular performer for a school assembly.
3. Tell Parents the Goal. Make sure you clearly state the financial goal for each school fundraiser. If you need $1,500, be sure that families know this. Likewise, when you complete the event, be sure to tell people how close you came to your goal or if you met or exceeded it. You never know, if you fall short, someone might offer to make up the difference. You won’t know until you put it out there!
4. Create Good Fundraising Incentive Prizes
Kids love incentives. Do some research to find out what some hot products are that would motivate kids to sell. If you don’t want to spend money on a prize, consider coming up with a prize that doesn’t cost anything, but still has great value, like five free homework passes or they get to be first in line at lunch for a week. Something like that can be very effective.
5. Regularly Communicate With Parents during the Fundraiser. You’ve heard the old expression, “Out of sight, out of mind.” This definitely applies to fundraising. The kids can get all pumped up on the first day of a sale, but after they leave a couple of messages with aunts and uncles, they can get bored and forget about it. If you have a means to communicate with parents on a regular basis (email or a flier put in the child’s folder, for instance), you should plan on updating parents on the fundraiser’s progress toward your goal, a reminder of why you are conducting the fundraiser, and some encouragement for parents to keep after this for the duration of the sale or event. Don’t do this too often- maybe once or twice is plenty.
If you are going to take the time and put the effort into a school fundraiser you might as well do the things that will maximize your sale. It takes just as much work to run an average fundraiser as it does to run a massive successful fundraising program. So you might as well go for the “Big One.”
