How to Make School Fundraising Safety a Priority

How to make your sale safe for everyone involved.

School fundraising safety is essential to your sales campaign, so it should be emphasized throughout. Once your students experience your kickoff assembly, they’ll be eager to start. The excitement level will be at a fever pitch because they will have seen the prizes they can win for selling.

How can you blame them for wanting to go out and approach potential customers as soon as they get home? This is the response that you want. After all, you’ve repeatedly emphasized the importance of making as many sales as possible.

And even though fundraisers are about raising money, keeping your student safe is most important. So how can you stress the importance of safe selling?

Differentiate Safe Customers from Strangers

At your kickoff assembly, your students need to know who they can talk to and who they shouldn’t. Many assume that, in the interest of making more sales and winning bigger prizes, students will go out and attempt to sell to everyone. Even though this is not necessarily true, they’ll still need to know who to approach. Here are two crucial school fundraising safety tips that will help:

1. Students should not be out selling without parent or guardian supervision, with no exceptions.
2. Their best chance to make sales is to talk to people they know. Strangers usually won’t purchase from them anyway.

Safe customers are people they know, like neighbors, family, and close friends.

Encourage Supervised Online Fundraising

Most school fundraising companies offer online selling as another way to make sales. Students who sell online will still receive prize credit and the group profits from each sale. Ensure the online store is secure and uses ‘HTTPS’ and not just an ‘HTTP’ in front of the website URL. Most website browsers will indicate that a site is secure by displaying a padlock symbol. Online selling should also take place under the supervision of an adult or guardian.

Educate Your Parents on Fundraiser Safety

To ensure fundraising safety, it’s also essential to educate your parents. If possible, introduce your sale before your kickoff date at a parent night. This is the perfect opportunity to discuss your safety rules and program expectations. The parent letter inside your student packets also discusses the importance of safe selling. Ensure you inform your parents to expect the packet on the kickoff date.

If properly communicated and executed, school fundraising safety will also increase sales.

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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.