Are You Satisfied With Your School Fundraiser?

Most schools who are satisfied with their current school fundraiser are also probably content with their current fundraising company. After all, the company has done everything that the school has expected. Their student fundraising packets arrived at the school already collated, their kickoff was a success, the product arrived in good condition and any needed replacement items were addressed and taken care of rather quickly.

However, if you were to dig a little deeper would you find things that might cause you to consider other options for your next fundraiser? Here are some questions that you might want to ask yourself to make sure:

• If you were to survey your customers, what would they say about the quality of the merchandise that they received?
• If you were to later ask your students about the prizes that they won, how excited would they be?
• Are you satisfied with the amount of money that you made?
• Have your sales trended up or down over the past few years?

You might be surprised at the feedback that you would receive. We have found that when it comes to prize programs, most school fundraising companies provide prize programs that include less than desirable prizes. What makes it worse is that most of your students will end up winning these types of prizes. Most students are initially excited about the prize program at the kickoff because they are focused on the bigger and more exciting prizes. However, what they soon realize once they get home and open up their fundraising packet is that they have to sell a lot of items in order to win those prizes. They often become discouraged and decide not to participate, or very little, or their parents refuse to sell that many items. As a result, you are lucky if any of your students reach these bigger more worthwhile prize levels. What’s worse is that fundraising companies bank on the fact that most students will fall between prize levels which means that they have sold more than required to get to the prize level below but not enough to receive the prize at the next level. Once the prizes arrive in the box both students and parents end up being disappointed with the quality. Believe it or not, this may end up adversely affecting your sale the following year because more people become skeptical and end up not participating.

Since most of your sellers will end up selling just enough to reach the first prize level why not replace their less than desirable prize with something much better? What if instead you replaced the prize in the lowest prize level with an activity like a big event that students could actually attend and participate in at their school? Do you think that more students would sell if they knew that they could win something really special by selling only a few items? What we have found is schools that switch over to a big event prize program like a Big Event Magic Show, Reptile Adventures Show, Super Party and Super Splash Party experience an increase in student participation which causes sales to go up significantly. Students are actually excited about going to something exciting and having to do very little to earn it. What also happens is the following year the school experiences a continued bump in sales. There are two main reasons for this. One, more students will sell next time because they see the actual event and also talk to the students that got to experience the event the previous year, and two, parents also end up preferring this type of prize program over a more traditional prize program. And let’s face it; it’s the parents that do the selling!