School Fundraising Tips

10 Tips to Promote Your School Fundraiser

how to make promoting your school fundraiser easier

10 Tips For Promoting Your School Fundraisers

Good fundraising ideas for schools aren’t hard to come by — it is  the challenge of promoting your new fundraiser that can take some time and planning. By successfully promoting your school fundraiser, you have a better chance of raising the funds you need and getting everyone involved. To be successful with your fundraising promotion, you will want to get your community involved and gain their support for a successful fundraiser from start to finish.

To make the best plan for promoting your school fundraiser, you’ll consider if you’re selling food or toys/products, catering to a younger or older demographic, and what seasonal items are trending at the time of sales. Your traditional school fundraisers, like holiday candles or classic catalogs, are often easy to promote. But if you’re thinking outside the box for high school fundraising ideas or school holiday shops, you may need to get a little creative with how you promote your school fundraiser this season to parents and the community. 

We’ve put together some of the best ways to get your fundraising ideas noticed, so your promotion is easy, simple, and successful. Get the best sales this year by following our easy school fundraiser promotion guide. 

how to make promoting your school fundraiser easier

1) Get the Message Out About Your New Fundraising Ideas for School

If you want your new fundraising idea to get attention, it will require getting your message out to the people you believe will be the most influential. You target audience will influence their friends, other parents, and the rest of the community to get involved. It’s important to find people who are passionate about your fundraising ideas so they will be eager to share the news. 

2) Keep a Limit on the Number of School Fundraisers That are Live

No matter what type of fundraising ideas you are hosting, too many fundraisers at once will overburden both school staff and volunteers. You want to keep your fundraising to a minimal not to overwhelm parents who are boosting and selling the items. 

High school fundraising can suffer in a big way from trying to run too many fundraisers at once because it can overwhelm students and parents as they attempt to fit different activities into their already busy schedules. Remember, fundraisers should fit naturally into social, educational, and work environments for all involved. 

Try to keep fundraisers to two max per season — if Sports and Arts do their fundraisers in the Fall, then have the school run their general fundraiser in the Spring. For families who have kids in multiple activities and social clubs, this balance is key for successfully promoting your fundraiser. 

3) Encourage People to Think of Fundraisers as Gifts

When promoting non-food items from your fundraiser, you want to promote your products as great gift ideas for birthdays, Christmas, Hanukkah, and more. Selling your fundraising items as gifts for birthdays, holidays, celebrations, and more, it’s possible to convince people that not only is the non-food fundraiser for a good cause, but it’s a clever gift idea as well that will be one less thing they need to shop for.

Make their seasonal and holiday shopping so much easier by allowing them to buy all their gifts directly from your fundraiser while supporting a good cause all at once. 

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4) Make Your Easy School Fundraiser a Little More Personalized with Local Promotion

Good fundraising ideas for a school effectively involve the local community and bring people together. Putting a personal touch on a fundraiser, such as gaining a local sponsor or making it clear what the funds are going to, will make people feel more invested and more likely to participate.

When people feel connected to a cause, they are more enthusiastic to be involved. So, promote your school fundraiser by partnering with locals or showcasing directly where the funds are going to in order to improve sales and overall success. 

5) Diversify Between Food and Non-Food Fundraisers

If you are used to selling candy bars or promoting frozen food items for your high school fundraising, it’s time to mix it up! Non-food fundraisers can be fantastic fundraising ideas for schools, and offer the opportunity to explore events, gifts, raffles, and more.

Use your resources to think outside the box and see what other non-food fundraisers you can dream up. Promote special offers your fundraiser is offering with all non-food fundraising items. Highlight that you have more than just candy bars or baked goods but gifts and products that are useful and decorative, lasting all year long. 

If your grade school or high school fundraiser is a raffle, event, other promotional giveaway, push this announcement so people are more likely invest. 

6) Good Fundraising Ideas for School Will Take Advantage of Different Seasons

The time of year your fundraising runs can be especially pertinent when considering what kind of goods your fundraiser will be selling and how to promote your school fundraiser. Certain items are more popular according to different seasons, especially when it comes to food items that are considered seasonal and non-food items that can be given as gifts.

Use all the seasons so your school fundraisers can also coincide with other events in order to take advantage of the community’s goodwill and willingness to contribute to a good cause. The more seasons you fundraise in, the better off your school will be! Make fun seasonal puns, highlight how immediately your fundraising items can be used, and pull on seasonal holidays like Easter, Christmas, Hannukah, and birthdays. 

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7) Highlight the Benefits of Your Non-Food Fundraising Products

The more creative your fundraising idea is the more enticing it might be to your community. Many people are simply willing to give to a good cause in order to help those in their community, but there are those that want to know that they’ll get a little something for their donation.

Coming up with creative ways to promote your fundraiser can go a long way towards satisfying those that are willing to donate to your cause, as it gives them something new and unexpected that excites them. Don’t just talk about where the money is going but what your buyers will receive and how it makes their life easy. 

8) Parent Involvement in High School Fundraising is a Bonus

Parent involvement at any level is important, but when it comes to high school fundraising, often the students are expected to self-start and find ways to earn money for their schools without parent support.

Gaining the support of more parent volunteers makes it obvious that the community is able to stand together and work towards the common good of the youth, even as the youth are expected to follow the example of their community leaders by helping to plan and operate their own fundraisers. Plus, parents can provide more resources and more areas to advertise than students alone. Use a combination of student-led fundraising and parent support in your high school fundraising. 

9) Keep Your Fundraising Ideas Versatile and Consider Your Sales Territory

Coming up with fundraising ideas can be difficult from time to time, but there are plenty of sites that can offer up different methods and techniques when it comes to fundraising. Sometimes running the same fundraiser a year or two in a row can work, but keeping things versatile is often preferable since this will offer the community a bit of variety. It’s also important to think about your sales territory and to adjust as needed.

Don’t forget that communities can change and spreading out to other areas could help increase awareness and possibly gain added funding. Always keep your base plan, but don’t be afraid to explore new avenues! 

christmas shop fundraiser

10) Many Good Fundraising Ideas for School Focus on Getting the Kids Involved First

More often than not, fundraisers are held for the benefit of a school, and the kids that attend the school. This means that involving the children should be one of the primary ideas when it comes to any fundraiser. Get them excited in some way by telling the kids what the money will go for, how it will benefit them, and why it’s important that they help to make it happen. When the kids are involved and a part of the process, the community is more likely to support their children to add to their excitement and success.  

Wrapping Up

Good fundraising ideas for schools don’t have to be super-complicated or even grandiose in nature, like a bake sale, selling candy bars or poinsettia’s, or even having a raffle that community members can take part in. Many businesses throughout a community will want to help in some way, and volunteers are rarely hard to find when it comes to helping out a local school or charity. Do your research when planning out your fundraiser, and remember the most important part of all, have fun with it. When you are excited, your volunteers will be excited, and promotion will happen naturally.

5 Ways to Simplify School Fundraising

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5 Ways to Simplify Fundraising

Easy School Fundraising Tips

It is about to be that time of year again — your child is coming home with a school fundraiser and is full of hope to earn all the great prizes they could get by being a top seller. Now it’s your turn to help with the holiday shop fundraisers. The question is — where do you start? 

Don’t worry, we have our top 5 tips to simplify your school holiday store fundraiser. Follow along with our guide to make it easy, stressfree, and successful this season. 

holiday gift shop fundraiser

Step 1: Define Your Selling Audience

The first step in your fundraising journey is to identify potential people to sell to. 

A lot of people envision school fundraising by going door to door and asking strangers for money. Door-to-door selling is hard and doesn’t lead to a lot of success. Taking the time to get your target audience set up will make the whole process much easier. 

Who Are the Two Target Groups To Sell To?

The two target groups you are going to want to talk to are Friends and Family and your Product People. By working in these two groups you should have your Christmas shop fundraiser off the ground and running immediately.

Friends and Family
A study showed that people who have a close relationship are 400% more likely to spend money on a fundraiser than strangers. Take the time and write down or put into a spreadsheet all the people you consider your friends or who you spend a lot of time with – consider people you interact with at your jobs, hobbies, volunteer work, church, sports organizations, and so forth. 

You will use this list to reach out and ask for help with the fundraiser. The best part is these friends and family are far more likely to help you and the conversations are so much easier to have than if you were talking with a stranger.

When you are talking to people you care about, it is important to make sure to let them know why the fundraiser is important to you or your child. They will be more likely to spend money if they know why and how they are helping you and your child out.

Product People
Product people are the people you think will want whatever your holiday gift shop is selling. If your fundraiser is selling food products then think of all the people you know that love food. If you are selling other items, go through your parent groups and think of anyone who might have mentioned an interest in what you are selling.

When you reach out to your product people remember your main selling point is the products. Make sure they know all the items your child is selling and the quality of the products. Instead of just directing them to the store to look for themselves, have a couple of items you think will interest them already picked out to show them.

Custom artwork by Kastle Kreations featuring detailed and unique design elements

Step 2: Ask For Referrals and Help

After you have talked to your two groups, it’s time to ask them to help out by spreading the word. Let them know how much it would mean to you and your child if they would reach out to their own group(s) of people and help the fundraiser.

One of the biggest mistakes of working a fundraiser is trying to do everything yourself. Try asking for referrals; it will cast a bigger net and allow you to reach people you might not have met before.

When talking to your product people, they might be a part of groups that have similar interests as they do. Tapping into the groups can be a gold mine since they are likely to be a product person themselves.

Tip! To make referrals easy, have extra copies of the product pages or the website URL handy. Referrals are more likely to be successful if you make it easy and quick for people to pass on your info, so have extra copies of the brochures (you can ask your child’s school) or have an email you can copy/paste with all the ordering info that you can send out and forward as requested. 

Step 3: Remember to Follow Up on the School Fundriaser

Keeping organized is key! You want to start a spreadsheet or write down everyone you talk to. Keep a list of who you’ve contacted, if they’ve ordered, if they’ve requested more info, and any other notes about your conversation. This sounds time-consuming but doesn’t have to be — keep a document on your phone’s notepad or have a notebook with your fundraising brochure to scribble notes in. 

Once a week or every two weeks, follow back up with people you’ve talked to. You’ll want to ask them if they’ve decided on a purchase they were thinking about or see if their referrals have asked for any more info. 

Calling people back is important because life happens and your fundraiser, more than likely, has taken a backseat and possibly been forgotten. Giving them a reminder might be the only way you get them to make an order so don’t be shy about following up. People will be excited to help out and will appreciate your follow-through. 

Holiday Pets Items

Step 4: Use Social Media

Use social media as a tool to announce to any and everyone about your holiday shop fundraisers. You never know who is looking at your posts and tapping into a new audience could be huge.

When creating a post include: who the fundraiser is for, why it is important to you and your child, and what products you are selling. Since social media is not targeting a specific audience, you need to try and pitch to everyone’s needs.

At the end of your post encourage people to leave comments. The more comments on a post the more Facebook will show to new people in their formula. Don’t be shy to take orders in the comment section or just tell people to comment if they are interested. 

Step 5: Set Realistic Timelines and Have Fun

Many parents think school holiday shop fundraisers are stressful because they need to deliver the products or items quickly. However, you can set-up a timeline that works for you when talking to your friends and taking orders.

Let them know when products are supposed to be delivered and organize the best that works for you to get products handed out. Don’t make it too fast or too busy all at once – remember, this should be fun!