Booster Club Fundraising

General Steps For Creating A Fundraiser

While there are many different fundraising tools out there and different ways to gain money for a booster club, they all follow a similar pattern.

Figure out what you want to raise money for.
- Being specific about your goal instead of a “general fund” can help your success rate.
Set a financial goal for your booster club fundraising efforts.
- How much money do you want to raise?
Write out your fundraising method and estimate the cost of your fundraising event
- What do you need?
- How much will it cost?
- What are the steps to reaching your booster club fundraising goal?
Make a timeline
- To pull off the fundraiser, what needs to be done, and in what order.
- Set a timeline for each task so you can focus or delegate as needed.
Find sources
- Booster club donations are great for helping to keep a low overhead
Host fundraiser as planned
Re-evaluate after
- What worked? What didn’t?
- Would you do it again?
- Did you reach your goals?

Types of Booster Club Fundraising Events

There are a lot of fundraising methods for nonprofit organizations. With there being so many different ways to have a successful booster club fundraising campaign, the hardest part is choosing which one to do.

The time of the year plays a significant factor in choosing which fundraisers are most successful. For example, a carwash would not be a good winter fundraiser, and a holiday wreath sale would not do well as a summer fundraiser.

Once you figure out which fundraisers are best for the season, then it’s time to decide which type of fundraiser you want. The two most prominent kinds of fundraisers are sales and events.

Spring

Popular springtime fundraisers include lollipops and candy bars sales thanks to Valentine’s day, these can often be sold as “candy-grams” and can earn a big profit for an item with low costs.

Summer

With summer comes the hot heat from the radiating sun. A perfect time for cash washes, sporting, and non-sporting events. Concessions could do quite well at a sporting event!

Fall

Autumn leaves, pumpkin spice and kids starting the new school year brings fall fundraisers to a start. With parents already spending money on back to school supplies, new school photos, and the upcoming holidays, targeting their desire to save money can do wonders for your fundraising.

Consider selling coupon books that offer discounts to local retailers and events, and scratch cards as these might do very well this time of year.

Winter

With the cold and unpredictable stormy weather outside, this time of year is excellent for hosting indoor events such as concerts, auctions, gala’s, art exhibits, and concerts. You may even have a thriving indoor garage sale if you can target the frugal Christmas shoppers looking to save money on presents.

Year-Round

While each season may have specific fundraisers that do better than others, some fundraisers are great all year round.

These include:

Bake-sales
Selling booster club merchandise
Pizza
Donuts
Fun run/walk
A-thon events

You can theme the a-thon events, and the fun run’s to fit with upcoming holidays to make them even more unique and enticing. For example, a color run in summer, or a zombie run in October, even a dance a thon could do well around a patriotic holiday if you themed it to a famous time in military history and allowed guests to dress up.

There are a lot of in-person fundraiser ideas, but don’t forget to think about the online fundraisers too!

Online Fundraisers

Online fundraisers offer a lot of opportunities for booster club fundraising that make them an excellent choice for increasing booster club revenue.

Some of the benefits of online fundraisers are:

Minimal physical effort
Reduced material costs
Convenient

Some online fundraiser ideas for booster clubs include Crowdfunding, text-giving, or selling merchandise like booster club t-shirts. Thanks to Dropshipping, you can design shirts, sell and ship without ever needing to buy inventory or touch a shirt.

Managing Booster Club Fundraising Events

Depending on the type of fundraiser that you choose, your booster clubs management responsibilities may differ. Low maintenance task such as drop shipping will require less management than a fundraiser that involves actual sales like candy bars, or hosting an event like a silent auction.

Some examples of things you can expect to do while managing your fundraiser are:

Setting it up
Promoting it
Delegating jobs to individuals or teams
Checking in on those teams for regular updates
Holding the fundraiser
Doing any cleanup
The after details
- What to do with leftover product
- Pay any vendors
- Figure out how much was made after costs
- Report back to the booster club

Thanks to delegating different tasks, booster club fundraising can be made much more manageable. With members all taking a portion of the workload, the stress doesn’t all fall on the president’s shoulders.

Promoting Fundraisers

Promoting a fundraiser is probably the hardest part of booster club fundraising. You can’t have a successful fundraiser and make a lot of money for your school if nobody knows that you are holding a fundraiser in the first place. So proper promotion is key to success!

Some popular ways to promote fundraiser include:

Flyers
- Hanging flyers inside the school to let the student body and faculty know about the fundraiser.
- Place inside local supermarkets to let the public know about it.
- Hand out directly to students and teachers 2 weeks before the event.
Banners outside of the school
- Another idea is if your school has a light board by the road, add your fundraising details a few weeks in advance and let it keep auto-playing through it.
Email or text newsletters
- Kids and adults are very likely to have a smartphone that allows them to receive emails and texts. Having digital reminders about the fundraiser costs little to nothing and is quick and efficient.
Social media
- Using your booster clubs social media accounts or the school’s (or both) you can get the word out this way.
School announcements
- The intercom at school or the morning school news reports is a great way to get last-minute details out to the students about the fundraiser.
The school’s website
- If your school has a website (or if you have one for your booster club) promoting the fundraiser online can help bring in your supporters.

Another great way to promote booster club fundraising is by joining forces with the other booster clubs inside your school. Teaming up for the greater good, means that you can reach more people, have more help in setting it up and make more money for your school. It’s a win-win-win.

Fundraising Donations Payment Methods

While not always the best route, sometimes it’s the most cost-effective. A lot of people want to help support their schools and booster clubs but don’t have the time to drive out to a car wash or gala; they may not even want a candy bar.

So an easy fundraiser that cuts straight to the chase is- accepting donations.

There are a ton of different platforms that you can use to accept donations for your nonprofit. Some of these include:

Accepting cash or check directly
- It’s common for people to give money during a sales fundraiser and request that they don’t get the product being sold.
PayPal
- Paypal offers two different ways that you can get money donated to your booster club.
- Texting and the Internet. Both take a small percentage.
- Donator does not need a PayPal account to use.
Fundly
- A website that lets you raise money for groups and individuals
- Free to launch campaign but they take almost 5% of the profit and another 3% per transaction
QGiv
- A website that gives customizable donation pages
- Charges a fee and a flat rate for transactions
@Pay
- Offers website and mobile donation pages
- Offers text to give option with their premium package

Depending on your booster club fundraising needs, you may find that providing a donation option may increase your booster club revenue.

Fundraising Partners

Another great way to promote your booster club and make money with fundraising is by taking on fundraising partners.

Fundraising partners are businesses (usually local) that help you with your booster club fundraising needs.

They can help by:

Offering you a monetary donation to get the ball rolling
Letting you use their place of business to hold the fundraiser
Donating goods, services or merchandise to help make your fundraiser a success

Why businesses helping booster clubs is a good idea

Here are a few reasons why business support is a good thing:

Companies usually have a bigger budget to help with these sorts of things
It looks good on them during tax season; they get a write-off for helping nonprofits
Established buildings like restaurant already have loyal patrons, so you can piggy-back off their success and make your own.

How to ask for businesses to help with your fundraiser

Firstly, gather everything you need to be able to make a good presentation.

Documents showing what your group is about
A statement proving you’re a nonprofit (they might want the registration number for their tax records)
A list of what you need from them and how it will be used.
A drawn-out plan on your fundraiser, let them know what it is and what it is for.

Secondly, call or enter the establishment and speak with the manager on duty or the owner, depending on the situation. Present your information and politely answer any questions that they might have.

More often than not, that’s all that is needed, and you can shake hands and leave.
Thirdly, after the fundraiser make sure to send a thank-you note and update on how the event turned out. They’ll be curious.
Sometimes, a job can come with too many responsibilities for a single person to handle. In these cases, handing off leadership can really help. Delegation is a great asset to booster club membership because it not only helps to release stress on some members, but it also gives non-board member booster club volunteers a chance to participate at a higher level.