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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
