Six Secrets of Wildly Successful Fundraisers

What every school needs is a fundraising fairy godmother—someone who’ll show up, wave her magic wand, and coordinate the school’s fundraising efforts. If you’ve agreed to play the role of fundraising fairy godmother for your child’s school or preschool, you may be wondering what it takes to pull together a successful fundraiser (as opposed to a fundraiser that never really gets off the ground). Here’s the lowdown on the secrets of wildly successful fundraisers from parents who’ve been there, done that, and lived to tell!

1. Put your team in place. Before you start dreaming up ideas for fundraisers, take the time to put your fundraising team in place. After all, you won’t be able to pull off much of an event if you’ve only got a handful of volunteers in place.

Don’t wait for people to come knocking on your door, however. That might never happen. Instead, approach people and ask them if they’d be willing to assume responsibility for a specific, short-term fundraising task (for example, soliciting items for the silent auction).

When you’re recruiting volunteers, be sure to give some thought to the future. Often, it makes the most sense to get parents of younger students involved. That way, there will be a pool of experienced volunteers to draw upon if a successful event is repeated the following year.

2. Switch into brainstorming mode. Once you’ve got your fundraising team in place, come up with a list of fundraising ideas. In addition to soliciting ideas from the members of your fundraising team, ask other parents at the school what types of activities they are most likely to support.

While the sky’s the limit during the initial brainstorming session, you’ll quickly want to discard those ideas that are unlikely to provide a poor return on the amount of volunteer time invested. (Bake sales and craft sales immediately come to mind.)

If you decide to go with product sales—something that can be controversial at the best of times!—you’ll probably want to put some ground rules in place about what is expected of students and their parents. (You might, for example, decide to discourage children from soliciting door-to-door for safety reasons—a policy that a growing number of schools are choosing to adopt.) You’ll also want to make sure that the products that you choose are top quality: that they provide good quality to the consumer, that they’re suitable for a school fundraiser, and that the school will receive a decent commission on the sales that are made.

3. Don’t put all your fundraising eggs in one basket. Rather than relying on a single fundraising event to bring in all of the cash, put your eggs in a number of different fundraising baskets. That way, people will be able to choose which events they’re most interested in supporting.

Don’t go overboard with the number of fundraisers, however. It’s generally best to limit yourself to three major fundraisers per school year. If you organize any more than that, you risk burning out your volunteers and creating resentment from kids and parents who may start to feel like they’re always being asked to buy something.

4. Keep the “fun” in fundraising. Parents and kids are unlikely to rally behind a fundraising campaign that seems more like a chore than a good time. If you can find a way to make your fundraisers feel less like work than play, you’re likely to find yourself with lots of enthusiastic helpers who are eager to support your event.