Simple ways to reduce stress and make fundraising easier.
Many groups get this wrong. If you exist to fundraise instead of fundraising to exist, you may need to reevaluate your group’s motives. Parents are more perceptive than we sometimes give them credit for. They’ll quickly pick up on your intentions if all you do is go from one fundraiser to the next. Yes, being well-funded is essential. However, other things must come first.
Instead, your board should align with the school’s goals and objectives. The primary purpose of any outside entity like a PTA or PTO should be to serve the parents, students, and school staff. If you have ambitious financial goals, it’s easy to get caught up in thinking you need to have one sale after another. However, this is also what leads to school fundraising fatigue. Here are some ways that you can avoid this problem.
Have a Fundraising Strategy Already in Place
Hopefully, before the school year begins, you could meet with your board to lay out a plan to tackle your monetary objectives. Your fundraisers should have been laid out along with your sales projections for each one. Each campaign already has a start and end date. By the start of school, you should be ready to roll out your plan to your entire school community.
And most important, don’t deviate from your original plan regardless of your sales results. This will instill trust in your parents. They should also know that if sales fall short, the students must do without some things. And keep reinforcing this throughout the year; hopefully, parents will get the message.
Work to Improve Fundraiser Results
It’s a vicious cycle. You have a sale that ends up not doing so well. So what do you do? You plan another one. Then you find that your second one does even more poorly. Why is that? Your parents are starting to develop school fundraising fatigue with no end in sight. They don’t know what’s coming next. As a result, more and more people ignore your requests to fundraise.
Instead, plan to put more effort into making the campaigns that you’ve committed to more productive. There are many ways that you can do this. For more information on improving a brochure fundraiser, see our additional incentive ideas.
Align Your Financial Goals to an Overall Purpose
If you’re raising money for the ‘general fund’ this can seem too vague to your parents. How do they know how much money you’re ultimately attempting to raise unless you commit to a more precise purpose?
Instead, if you’ve done your homework and know your financial goals, you can share them with your parents at your first parent night meeting. Your parents should come away with an understanding of what you’re raising money for, how much money is needed, and how much you hope to make with each fundraiser.
You can even take it further by letting parents know how much you expect them to sell for each sale. If they know this information up front, your black hole becomes a light at the end of the tunnel. In other words, they can see an end to the fundraising. Better yet, they can see that there’s a plan.
Avoiding school fundraising fatigue can be simple as long as you’re willing to commit to a well-thought-out strategy.
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.