What About Home Delivery Fundraisers?

Many schools are looking for ways to simplify the school fundraising process as much as possible. Presorted merchandise has made the delivery process a lot easier because organizations no longer need to sort merchandise once it’s delivered to their school. A lot of groups are considering discount cards as a way to simplify the delivery process even further. What about home delivery? Several fundraising companies offer it; is it something that your school should consider?

In order to answer those questions and make an effective decision for your next school fundraiser it may be important to consider the following:

What type of fundraising product are you considering?
Since each of your sellers merchandise will be boxed and delivered to a home or work address based on what information has been placed by the parents on the order form, you will not be able to sell frozen food because the box may need to sit until it is attended to

Are you willing to receive less profit for your school fundraiser?
Most fundraising companies offer a lower profit percentage in order to ship individual boxes to several different addresses as opposed to shipping all of the boxes to one central location like with a standard delivery

Are you willing to be somewhat out of the loop?
This seems obvious, but it’s really not. If you have been used to tracking your orders and ensuring that everyone receives what’s been ordered then this will be a new experience for you. For example, with our company, you would still receive a fundraising report booklet along with a notification letting you know that people will start receiving their orders shortly, but you won’t actually know that boxes are being delivered. If anything arrives missing or damaged, instructions are placed inside every box along with a toll-free phone number for each parent to call. In other words, replacement items are handled directly between the parent(s) and a toll-free parent hotline department which is staffed with full-time bilingual customer service representatives

How well do you trust your parents?
Since you will be out of the loop if you use home delivery, your parents will be handling everything from receiving their order to checking it and ordering replacement items to delivering the merchandise to customers. You will also need to assume that a correct address has been placed at the top of each student’s order form

Home delivery for your next fundraiser can be a very wise choice as long as you realize that there is more to it than just eliminating the delivery at your school.