Booster Club End of Year Checklist – 2024 Edition

Introduction

It’s hard to believe that 2024 is juuuuust about over!  As the winter breaks commence, and the full force of the holidays is upon us, it is also time to consider wrapping up your booster club’s 2024.  Don’t fret, this should not be a lengthy tasks – especially if your organization is up to date!  The good news is, staying on top of your annual closing to-dos will make your 2025 that much more impactful!  To help your organization out, we have put together a checklist of items to consider handling before the new year!

What Does a Booster Club Need To Do At The End of The Year?

Closing out the year for a booster club, is really the same for any nonprofit or business.  The primary goal is to make sure that on January 1, 2025, your small nonprofit or booster club is ready to tackle the new year, new business and new initiatives with a CLEAN slate!  From accounting to marketing to supporter management – this is the best time to take a pause, review and make any updates, financial decisions and adjustments to close 2024 and start your 2025 off and running without a hitch!

 

Review and Close Booster Club Accounting

With the end of the year, comes taxes and financial compliance for every nonprofit, no matter the size.  If your booster club has not already updated its books for 2024, now is the time to review them and get them caught up!  Make sure that Accounts Payable are paid, and any accounts receivable items are paid to the club as well. This will help ensure that your account balances make sense and are organized before the new year starts.  Once your accounting is up to date, it will make it incredibly easy to close your books for 2024.

In addition to reviewing your accounting and fiscal performance, your small nonprofit or booster club needs to make sure that any donor receipts and invoices are sent for any tax deductible contributions that have been made to your organization. Making sure your organization is on top of these receipts is not only a good business practice, but also gives your booster club an additional touch point with someone that may be willing to donate again in the future!

To help you understand who may need receipts, we put together a quick top-level guide below:

• Cash or Check Donation = Receipt for full value of donation.
• Credit Card Donation = Receipt for amount of donation minus any credit card fees that were deducted.
• In-Kind Donation = blank receipt for donor to add proper value (you can suggest value if common item)
• In-Kind Services = No receipt as these are not deductible
• Item Donations for Resale or Auctioning = Receipt for stated value of item donated

Don’t forget to make sure any receipt issued to the donor includes your organization name, its 501c3 status/number and the date of the donation.

If you are booster club or small nonprofit, Booostr Financial Manager can help you keep track of your financials with an extremely easy to use interface.  Even if you don’t have accounting experience, Booostr has simplified accounting for the smallest nonprofit and booster club. Learn more today!

 

Update and Analyze Your Contact Database

In addition to closing out your books for the year, now is a great time to review your contact database.  When we talk about reviewing your contacts, this is to make sure that your supporter lists are up to date, and organized in a way that your booster club or small nonprofit can best utilize your supporters in the new year.  If you have bouncing emails, contacts with no phone numbers, missing email addresses or missing physical addresses, now is a great time to work on getting those contacts updated!  Here are a few top-level strategies to handle updating your supporter list:

Bouncing Or Missing Nonprofit Supporter Emails

Resolving emails not being received can be tricky. The first step is to check and see if you have an alternate contact method on file. If so, great!  Reach out and ask for the correct email.  Without an alternate contact method you can try the following:

• Talk to a mutual contact if you have one
• If you know where they work, you can try reaching out to them at work
• Do some internet sleuthing on social media and try to reach out there

Missing Booster Club Supporter Phone Numbers

When you have a contact without a  phone number, that may or may not matter. However, to ensure you have multiple contact methods for your contacts, it is a good practice to make sure you have a phone number as a secondary contact method.  The easiest way to update this, is to reach out to your contacts via email and ask for an update. If you are on Booostr PRO, you can also utilize our new Form Manager tool to create a new form and ask your contacts to update their contact information there.  Making sure you include a First Name, and the Phone Number fields and requiring all fields will update that contact in your Booostr Contact Manager automatically!  If you do NOT have an email address for the contact, here are some additional ways you can try to update their phone number:

• If you have their mailing address, try mailing a letter with a link/QR code to take them to a Booostr Form Manager form to update their contact information.
• Try talking to mutual contacts to obtain their phone number and then call them to OK the update.
• If you know where they work, you can try reaching out to them at work
• Do some internet sleuthing on social media and try to reach out there

Missing Booster Club Supporter Physical Mailing Address

Today mailing information to people  is not as common as it used to be. However, in many communities – especially with Booster Clubs and small nonprofits, the primary supporters could be older.  With elderly contacts, many prefer physical mail to other forms of communication. Even if your contacts are younger and/or already have given your small nonprofit or booster club an email address and phone number – having a mailing address is just a great back up (ie. Plan A, B and C!). Here are ways to update a contact’s physical address:

• Email them directly and ask for their physical address – you might want to use the pretense of sending out receipts or that some communication may be mailed next year.
• Email supporters with a link and QR code to send them to a Booostr Form Manager Form to update their physical address (easy peasy!)
• Call your supporters with a phone number to touch base and update their physical mailing address
• If the supporter is a business, look the business up online as most business addresses are public information

If you are not already using Booostr, you should!  Our Contact Manager (CRM) Tool makes it easy to both manage and GROW your booster club’s or nonprofit’s supporter database! Contact Manager is a core feature offered with Booostr and available with both our FREE plan (up to 150 contacts) and PRO plan (unlimited contacts).  It integrates natively into almost every tool from email marketing, to Form Manager to Financial Manager.  The team here at Booostr has made it SUPER simple to store, grow and manage your contacts.  Take Booostr for a spin today!

 

Start Planning For the New Year

We cannot stress planning your year out enough.  Even if your booster club is primarily only operational from June-December, now is the time to start planning your new year. There is no reason your booster club or small nonprofit should not be active all year around – in fact it is critical that it IS active all year round! That being said, when we say active, it does not mean the intensity is the same!

We understand that your booster club year ramps up at certain times and is more mellow at others. What we are trying to get across, is that those mellow times of the year should not be radio silent.  Those mellow times of the year are actually opportunities! The entire year should have events and initiatives spaced out throughout for multiple reasons including:

1. More opportunities to raise money
2. More opportunities ensures a better chance of a successful year
3. Takes the stress off of the busier times of years
4. Helps your booster club or small nonprofit mission make a bigger impact
5. Year long planning makes achieving organization goals more feasible
6. Planning in advance helps create better, more memorable initiatives

Does this mean you need a detailed plan on January 1st for the entire year? Heck no! If your leadership team is shifting to year long planning try following these steps.

First Step For New Year Nonprofit Planning

Outline your year month by month – not in detail, but top level. Start with your busy time of year, and established fundraisers, events and meetings.

Second Step For New Year Nonprofit Planning

Review your top level calendar and see where you have holes or as we noted – opportunities! Continue to fill out your calendar month by month until your team feels like your booster club or small nonprofit has solid ACHIEVABLE schedule.  This does not mean a fundraiser per month or even an event per month.  What it does mean, is that perhaps a monthly meeting, one fundraiser per quarter, and maybe some additional online strategies.

Third Step For New Year Nonprofit Planning

With your booster club’s top level annual calendar, now dive in quarterly and monthly to starting with first quarter (January-March) and begin adding detail as to what needs to be done, when and who will handle different aspects.  Rinse and repeat for the rest of the quarters.

This entire exercise should take 1-2 hours to have something pretty solid for at least the year and detailed out through a couple of quarters.

Setting up your booster club or small nonprofit to take a year-long view of their work, can be a larger undertaking the first year you do this, but every successive year it will get easier – we promise!  Stop operating your nonprofit as a hobby and start operating it as a business. Plan, set goals and execute!

One of the best ways your booster club or small nonprofit can execute better in the new year is with software.  Booostr offers 15 connected tools to allow small nonprofits and booster club manage their organization better. From Document Sharing, to Contact Manager (CRM), Email Marketing, SM Text Messaging, Financial Management, Online Forms, Ecommerce and even Website Builder/Hosting – our solution is tailored for small organizations on the go that want to GROW!  Start for FREE Today or set up a time to Demo Booostr.

 

Review Any Miscellaneous Open Business Items

Finally, after you have completed all of the above, review any miscellaneous business that might be open and should be addressed to be closed.  This could be related to updates to Organization Bylaws, various volunteer issues, activity director or coaching issues or perhaps school or community issues that need resolving.  The end goal is to try and make sure that any open business is closed so that the new year can be started with a bang!