Exceed Your High School Fundraising Goals

If there were additional incentives that you could easily incorporate into your high school fundraiser that would increase your fundraising sales without taking much work to integrate and wouldn’t cost you much money, would you consider it? Most good school fundraising coordinators will do whatever it takes to ensure that their fundraiser is successful as long as it doesn’t cost them a lot of time or money. If you want to make a lot of money on your next fundraiser you are going to have to do three things:

1. Offer more than just the company prize program. In other words, plan to also offer additional incentives
2. Set an initial fair-share goal that you will want everyone to reach. For example, most fundraising coordinators want their sellers to sell at least 10 items. Hopefully you have done your homework by determining how much each student will need to sell in order to reach your group's fundraising goal. A good profit/item goal to use is $4.00
3. Set an even higher goal for those students who are willing to go the ‘extra mile’ in order to win, or have a chance to win your additional incentive(s). In order to qualify for an additional incentive the item goal will need to be higher. A good round number may be 25 items, for example

In order for an additional incentive to be effective it needs to be something that most of your students would find fun and exciting. It also has to be something that they would be willing to work harder for. The problem is that finding those types of incentives requires some thought and creativity. What follows is a small sample of great ideas that have proven successful in helping fundraising coordinators to increase their fundraising sales:

• For every student who sells ‘x’ items, they get to throw a pie (or a water balloon) in __________________ face (you can fill in the blank, but whoever it is, make sure it is someone that they would be really motivated to sell for. You get the picture!)
• If the whole group sells ‘x’ items then everyone wins free pizza or ___________________.
• For every student who sells ‘x’ items they get their yearbook for free!
• For every student who sells ‘x’ items they get a free ticket to the next school dance or ____________________.
• Find someone on campus who would be willing to participate in The Mystery Person Game
• Incorporate The Money Game into your sale
• Use prize coupons and incorporate them into daily drawings

Whatever additional incentive that you decide to incorporate, make sure that you:

• Do your homework by doing the math first. Make sure that you spend the time to run some numbers before you advertise your additional incentive and how much each student will have to sell to get it. For example, if you know that the yearbook costs $50.00 you won’t want to give one away for every student who sells 10 items. Most students would probably sell 10 items but you would not make any money. Here are some numbers that you will want to use with your math calculations. Use $4.00 profit for every item sold. Multiply that number by the number of items that you think is reasonable. For example if you know that yearbook will cost you $50.00 (or less if you can arrange to get it at cost) then you would probably want to have each student sell at least 25 items in order to qualify for the yearbook (25 items x $4.00 profit/item = $100.00 gross profit - $50.00 yearbook cost = $50.00 net profit)
• Heavily promote your additional incentive(s) in order to ensure that you get a good return on your investment. Why would you spend the time and money on something and not make sure that your sellers were working towards it? Regardless of how much it costs you, remind your sellers as often as you can about it and how having it will benefit them
• Promote low cost or no cost incentives with the same conviction as you would more expensive additional incentives. Don’t look at an incentive that doesn’t cost you anything as something that you don’t have to promote as much. Think of it as something that you will promote just as much as an incentive that costs you a lot of money. You will simply make more net profit when all is said and done

Keep in mind that you can always do a drawing instead of giving your incentive to everyone who sells ‘x’ items. This will help to spread the wealth around a little; however keep in mind that since usually only one person will win the drawing make sure the incentive is really good. You may need to spend a little more money in order to engage more sellers to sell more just to be in a drawing.

Your school fundraiser will be successful if you are able to persuade the majority of your students to reach for your additional incentives goal. Even if some do end up falling short, they will still sell more than they would have had there not been an additional incentive offered to them at all.