Most of us have been approached by a student selling for a middle school or high school fundraiser who says, "Want to buy something?" Students are often unprepared to make an effective sales presentation and can even come across as unprofessional. We are more apt to buy from someone who can tell us who they are, what organization they represent and why we should support them.
Better Rewards, Bigger Results
Fundraising Ideas - Elementary, Middle & High School Fundraisers
Increase Fundraising Sales
Your ultimate goal should be to raise as much money as possible. Review our suggestions on how to maximize your fundraising sales
One of the best ways to increase school fundraising sales and raise more money is to add additional prize incentives. For instance, young sellers get very excited at the idea of getting to ride in a big limousine or going to a big pizza party; so as a result, a lot of sellers compete for this special incentive by selling more items. This is a great way to add yet another element of excitement to your school fundraising campaign, so we highly encourage you to consider it.
Some people feel that students involved with high school fundraisers don't sell as well as younger students when it comes to school fundraising. By the time students reach high school they are no longer as excited about winning prizes like they were when they were younger. It also takes a lot more to motivate a high school student to sell for a variety of reasons:
Most of the time elementary school fundraising coordinators or PTA boards focus on ways to increase overall sales or seller participation. What is often not discussed however is how to increase the number of individual sales made per seller. In other words, how can we make those who already participate in your fundraiser even more productive? If you can find ways to increase the productivity of those who are already selling, your sales results would increase significantly.
Most people who are in charge of their school fundraiser don’t really give the school fundraising prize program a second thought. As long as it contains decent prizes and the prize levels are somewhat reasonable, what else should matter? After all, every fundraising company offers the same prizes, right?
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.
It seems that when it comes to school fundraisers, most fundraising companies offer the same types of prize programs. They put the cheap prizes at the lower levels and the better prizes at the higher, more difficult to reach levels. This makes financial sense for the company; however most students will only win the cheaper prizes. Until recently, most schools have overlooked what prizes individual students are receiving in exchange for school wide sales results.
The most overused cliché seems to be when people tell us that ‘it takes money to make money’. For the most part, they are right. If you offer bigger and better prizes that cost more money, competition will increase as more students are drawn in to work harder to increase school fundraising sales. Spending extra money on fundraising prizes may be easier for some schools than for others however. Therefore the question then becomes, “how can we increase our school fundraiser sales without having to spend the extra money?”
Why do some high school fundraisers raise lots of money while other fundraising groups at the same school barely bring in much at all? What makes them different? You would think that since we’re talking about the same school that fundraising results would be similar.
Let’s face it; fundraising companies need to make a profit just like the high school fundraiser groups that they work with. Good companies are always looking for ways to help fundraising groups increase the amount of money that they bring in.