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07Aug

Five Ways to Ensure Your Fundraiser is a Success

Geri Martin | | Return|

Five Ways To Ensure Your Fundraiser is a Success

You’ve been asked (or volunteered) to be involved in fundraising for your child’s team or school. What do you do? How do you ensure your fundraiser is a success?

Well rest easy, we have some tried and true steps to ensure your fundraiser gets off to a great start.

Before you begin it is good idea to think through the following: goal, who is involved in the effort, timeline, contests, and reporting progress.  We will address each one individually.

  1. What is Your Fundraising Goal?

Give serious thought and discussion to how much money you want to raise in the fundraising effort. With the end goal in mind, it is good to know how the funds you raise will be used. Are you raising funds for a team to get new uniforms, or attend a tournament? Is it for an entire elementary school to benefit a specific cause?  Knowing your goal helps define how you communicate the need and urgency as well as the amount you hope to raise.

  1. Who is Involved?

It is a good idea to know how many families are expected to participate in the fundraising effort. This gives good insight into who you are going to be communicating with. You may decide you will be sending out emails to a distribution list; i.e. parents of your child’s little league team, or all third grade parents in your child’s elementary school. Understand your audience and how the fundraiser can benefit them. For example, if you are using the Inspire.World as a fundraising partner by selling the Inspire.World Perks entertainment app, you will want to be able to highlight the many, family friendly discounts available via the app for dining, entertainment and services in your area.

  1. What is Your Timeline?

If you are in charge, you may be able to choose your own fundraising timeline. If it is being driven by another event -- attending a tournament, or before a school break -- you will have some critical dates by which you need to reach milestones. And that brings us to our next step:

  1. Contests

Have a kick-off contest at the beginning and maybe a final push contest at the end. Contests build excitement and participation. Give some thought and talk through with your coach or other parent volunteers or school administration -- as the case may be -- to decide the best time to hold a contest and what a potential prize might be for the winning classroom, or team member. Sometimes the “prize” can cost you nothing. For example, if your school wears uniforms, it could be an out-of-uniform day for the winning class. If they don’t wear uniforms, it could be a fun dress up or dress down day, i.e. the winning second grade class can wear their pajamas to school. For a winning individual team member prize, it could be a $25 gift card to a local restaurant.

       5. Report  Progress

Keep your individual fundraisers and supporters in the loop regarding your fundraising efforts. If you held a 48 hour blitz to see who could raise the most right out of the gate and held a contest for that, publicize the contest, what the prize(s) will be, and then follow up as soon as you can after the blitz period to show how much was raised and who won. Celebrate the winners. Send an email or text to supporters, post something large and visible in the school or team locker room all to see – we’re all familiar with the thermometer type gauge that measures progress to the end goal.

Remember have fun with the effort, the communication, and the contests. It is all for a good cause. And we’re here to help -- Inspire.World can help you reach your fundraising goals.

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