Keep Your Eye on the Prize!
Focusing on Goals and Other Hot-Buttons While Reaching Out to Parents for your Next Fundraiser
Here’s a laundry list of ideas to boost parent support for your next fundraiser:
- At every opportunity, communicate the specific goal of your group’s fundraising project. Parents respond better if they know exactly how fundraising efforts will help their children.
- Stress the importance of adult supervision and parental involvement when students are asked to participate.
- Let parents know that you are sensitive to their time and pocketbooks by limiting fundraising to a few, high impact projects. They’ll double their efforts to help if they know they’re only going to be called upon once or twice a year.
- Provide parents with a complete fundraising schedule at the beginning of the year to avoid surprises. Include launch dates, deadlines for turning in orders/money and when appropriate, an estimated delivery time for products.
- Use every means available to communicate important information to parents and updates on the fundraising campaign.
- Take advantage of special school events to display products, garner extra sales or provide pertinent information on the current campaign. For working parents, organize before- and after-school “drop-in” programs. Or identify assignments that can be done from home or over a lunch break.
- Include with your letter to parents tips on how to fundraise unobtrusively in the workplace.
- Offer parents who are weary of tapping family and friends new ideas for fundraising OUTSIDE the workplace and home, such as adult sports leagues, church, social and civic club meetings.
- Offer family and/or parent incentives for participating, such as dinner at a local restaurant or a raffle ticket for a weekend getaway to a nearby popular destination.
And, finally, find a way to say “thank you” to all participants – such as a fast breakfast break one morning in the school cafeteria. Use this opportunity to report the final results and recognize extra efforts.