How to Achieve Your School Fundraising Goal

Simple ways to help your students succeed.

Sponsors that do their homework already know what their school needs. You can also find out if a common thread keeps popping up as you talk to others.

The next step is to determine how much money needs to be raised. Setting your school fundraising goal is important because everyone must know what it will take to achieve the purpose.

Yet merely establishing your purpose and financial goal is still not enough. You'll want to ensure your students understand what they need to do. By establishing sales expectations for your students, they can do their part and work towards a common goal more easily.

Establish Individual Seller Goals

Setting individual seller goals is as important as the overall group goal. Everyone must know what will be required from them individually by setting a fundraising goal for each seller to help the group achieve their ultimate results.

This is relatively easy to determine. Let's say that a school has 500 students and needs to raise $10,000. If you divide $10,000 by 500, each student must raise $20 profit. If the school receives 40% profit, each student must sell $20 ÷ 0.40 = $50 worth of items. If the average retail price in the brochure is $10, each student must sell five items or more. Groups need to promote their overall school fundraising goal and each seller's individual goal throughout the sale.

Set Short Term Sales Goals

Let's say you're a small cheerleader group with 25 members who must raise $5,000. Each participant would then need to raise $200 profit. Each seller must sell 50 items to reach the $500 retail goal ($200 ÷ 0.40 =$500). Fifty items can seem overwhelming unless you divide them into smaller amounts throughout the fundraiser. If the group planned to sell for two weeks, each cheerleader could sell an average of 4 items daily for 14 days. They would thus exceed their 50-item goal. Four items per day are easier for students to grasp than 50 items over two weeks.

This type of approach also works to encourage ambitious elementary school students to exceed their individual goals as well. They can set smaller, more manageable daily goals if they see a special prize they want at a higher level.

Track your Fundraising Progress

For larger groups, such as school-wide elementary and middle schools, it will be harder to track your sales progress, but still possible. One way is to do periodic drawings during the sale for students who turn in prize drawing coupons. Every time students sell five items, they turn in a prize coupon. The sponsor then announces prize winners throughout the sale as students' names are drawn out of the box. To achieve maximum benefit, ensure everyone knows about the drawings beforehand. In addition to students winning additional prize incentives, you can announce who's turning in the most coupons and make it a fun competition. Ultimately, verifying the coupons by matching them up with the actual order form will be important.

It's much easier to track sales progress for smaller high school groups. Make sure to meet with your group regularly throughout your fundraiser and ask them how much they've sold. Ask them to show you their order forms and money envelopes. This will ensure they are also collecting money with their orders. It may also be a good idea to post the sales progress for everyone to see. The following graph can be used to track your sales progress:

You can also make your check-in days fun and exciting by incorporating incentives like the money game. These steps will help you achieve and even exceed your school fundraising goal.

See our brochure fundraisers.

Author Bio

Clay Boggess has been designing fundraising programs for schools and various nonprofit organizations throughout the US since 1999. He’s helped administrators, teachers, and outside support entities such as PTAs and PTOs raise millions of dollars. Clay is an owner and partner at Big Fundraising Ideas.