Below is the step-by-step testimony from a real school who profited $137,000 with the MyBooster Fundraiser! Read on and learn how you, too, can maximize your profit!
Fundraising Theme
"To begin, we created a “theme” for our fundraiser a few years ago. We called it Lion on the Loose - our school mascot is a lion so we have him “on the loose” causing trouble around the school.
The week of the fundraiser we have different dress-down themes. This year our Lion was turning thirty so everything was birthday-themed. We had superhero party day, Hawaiian party day, glow party day, etc. So the entire week is dress down culminating with a field day.
The fundraiser always ends with a field day - last year we hired a company who hosted a capture the flag tournament. This year we had a DJ party and our older kids had a color run."
Communication
"Communication is definitely key for us. We usually start marketing our fundraiser a month out. We push out a ton of information during the fundraiser week through our room parent chats. We have constant updates on how their classes are doing in meeting their class goals and how the school is doing meeting its overall goal. When we have teachers volunteer for dunk tank, we always send out a blast to that classroom letting them know their teacher is participating so we encourage those students to raise enough money to get some tosses at the tank. But basically, we are sending out information multiple times a day. This year myself and another member of our board made videos that were played during morning announcements and sent to parents just to keep the hype going.
We do e-mail blasts from our school and then we have room parents who all have individual chats set up for their respective classes, so we send out a lot of communication through them. We usually have some sort of a flyer that we repost to get everyone engaged and ready.
Purpose of the Fundraiser
We also always make it clear what we are fundraising for and when we anticipate that project to be completed if our goal is met. Parents like to see the money they donated go to use quickly.
Incentives/ Rewards
The week before our fundraiser kicks off we usually host a pep rally for the kids where we announce our incentives. Typically our baseline donation amount includes a t-shirt for the kids to wear at the end of the fundraiser field day. We also have had bandanas, eye blacks, foam paws, sunglasses, etc. As the amounts get higher, we have a dunk tank - where the kids get to dunk their teachers - this is super popular. We also have top earner prizes: we’ve had Nintendo switches, cash prizes, etc. We also have family goals, so that if you have more than one student. the total the entire family raises gets counted toward a prize. We usually have something like a week dress down pass, an excused day off of school, lunch with your favorite teacher, and lunch with our principal as our family prizes. And we have school wide goal prizes - this year we did a jousting match between faculty and an administration served ice cream party.
We have a 100% class participation goal - which means every kid in the class is registered and donated at least $35. If the entire class participates they get a Kripsy Kreme donut party. We also do a class goal - we calculate this by taking the amount we are trying to raise and divide by the number of students. So this year with our 75k goal we calculated that at about $150 per student. So we add up the amount of students per classroom and then we make that their class goal - usually about $3500. We put thermometers outside their classrooms and we update their amounts daily so they know how close they are to reaching their goal.
We also try to incentivize the teachers, so top-earning classes get a prize while their teachers will receive a $100 gift card.
Sponsors
One thing we implemented last year that really helped was we asked for “sponsors” for all our incentives. We send out a list of the prizes and their costs and ask families to sponsor them and that really helps us retain as much of the fundraising money as possible. The last two years we’ve had all our prizes sponsored, which has saved us thousands of dollars. Our sponsors also have perks: if you are a sponsor over $1000 we will print and hang a banner of your family or business to hang at our school - a lot of our business owner families like this for marketing purposes. Our t-shirt sponsor, which is always our most expensive item, has their business logo printed on the back of the t-shirts.
Summary
I think what makes the fundraiser so successful is a combination of a very generous school community, really good communication mediums between chats, emails and socials, and getting prizes the kids actually want and will enjoy.