Elementary School Fundraising Prizes and Prize Programs

If you have been involved with fundraising at your school, you are certainly aware that there are many ways to get students and parents excited about your elementary school fundraising efforts.

The basis for a good promotion of your fundraiser will likely be a student prize program. Most fundraising companies offer these and some are better than others. Schools also can purchase product on their own if they want the extra work.

A student prize program that is cumulative is the most effective. These student prize programs allow students to earn numerous prizes depending on how many items they have sold.

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Self-Promotion Warning:
In the following sentences, I tell you how great we are.

Make sure to get the highest quality prize program you can. There are reports of cheap prizes out there and if you purchase them yourself, try to get the highest quality items you can.

Believe Kids fall prize program is very good. If you need a prize program to compare to, let me know. Believe Kids offers 11 cumulative prize levels. There are 4 prizes at 10 items sold and the top item is at 125 items. You won't believe the items being offered either. Please get in touch if you would like to see it. You will get a sense of what a truly exceptional prize program is.

End self-promotion

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On top of a student prize program, many times one or more incentives or goal rewards will be offered. These could be really anything that adds to the excitement of the fundraiser because of hitting goals, rewarding top-sellers, daily incentives or group rewards.

Here are a few ideas in no particular order that cost a lot of money:

Lunch Limo Ride
BMX Show
Video Game Truck

In these scenarios, a fundraising company will likely pay these for you and they should not take profit percentage away. I have heard of some companies taking 5-10% of profits for these events. I would recommend that you work it out in terms of the cost of the event instead of a percentage - if your sale does well, you would be spending a lot more than the event costs to host.

If you are hosting your own fundraiser of some sort, make sure that the money these efforts cost do not make your fundraiser profits suffer. I read about a $700 gross fundraiser that a school held where they incentivised it with a $400 estimated limo ride. You really have to be careful about these things. These incentives work best when enhancing your highest-profit fundraisers.

Here is a quick list of a few promotions that don't cost much:

Invite a student to be principal for a day
Lunch with principal or favorite teacher
Movie & Popcorn with principal or favorite teacher
Ice cream social for top-selling class
Ice cream for entire school when goal is hit
Principal gets a mohawk when goal is hit
Principal spends day in tree (or other zany idea) when goal is hit
Duct Tape faculty to wall (be careful with this as there has been some sexual related problem lately. Always cover personal parts with cardboard before taping.)

There are some daily drawings that also work well... Consider these:

Some sort of treat for children who hit their sales goals (yes, I guess I mean candy and yes, my kids eat too much of it already so I am hesitant here).
Have a drawing of an iPod or some sort of popular electronic item
Purchase various prizes and have a drawing every day the fundraiser is going on.

If you put some incentives into your fundraiser the results will follow. You can rely on a fundraising company to help or do it yourself. In the end, anything you can do to build excitement around the fundraiser will help create success.

Thanks for looking!

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Jay Moneta is the Vice President of Believe Kids Fundraising and can be reached via comment on any of my blog posts, at www.BelieveKids.com or on twitter - twitter.com/BelieveKids

I wrote this one pretty fast so it is not my best work. I still would love any comments, feedback or suggestions you would like to offer. Thanks so much!

Fundraising Incentives for your School!

One thing is clear! Incentives work.

In planning your next fundraiser, make sure you are providing a good reason for folks to get involved.

Everyone loves encouragement

Regardless of what you use to encourage participation in the fundraiser, the more you can do to get people excited and interested in helping, they more effective your fundraising efforts will be. Here is a list of groups that could use encouragement:

• Students
• Teachers
• Administrators
• Faculty
• Principals
• Parents
• Relatives
• Community

So, it certainly seems impossible to provide incentives to all these groups but it's really not all that challenging.

Here's why:

Parents, Relatives & The Community

The reality is that parents, relatives and the community at large receive the gift of charitable giving, helping children and improving education. Having said that, they still need some encouragement to purchase. That's where running a quality fundraiser comes in. A good gift catalog or a cookie dough offer should be enough to earn their support.

Faculty, Administrators & Principals

When it comes to the school, it's not always easy to garner the support of teachers, principals and administrators. With everything going on today in schools with budget cuts and lower fundraising returns due to a bad economy, many schools are getting more involved on their own.

Our best advice is to ASK!

Ask the principal to send out an email, ask the receptionist for help if needed and ask teachers to encourage their classes to participate. Yes, perhaps a bit different asking for help but it will produce results. Keep in mind that not all incentives require money - freebies and delivering cups of coffee go a long way.

Students

Students should be incentivised in a few different ways if possible. A good fundraising company will provide daily incentives to remind them to work on the fundraiser daily as well as a quality prize program. There are a number of other ideas that will help so consult with your fundraising rep. Most likely they work for a company that will supply other ideas as well such as a top-seller prize.

This is one case where your fundraising company can really be of assistance. If a school does little to promote a fundraiser, the results will likely reflect that. On the other hand, if a school and fundraising company work together to really promote the fundraiser, it will be a huge success!

In the end, here's your success challenge: get everyone you can involved and reward everyone you can!

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Jay Moneta is the Vice President of Believe Kids Fundraising and blogs here regularly. If you would like more information visit www.BelieveKids.com If you enjoy the information here, please share links or leave comments, questions or feedback for me. I can also be reached on twitter - twitter.com/BelieveKids Thanks for looking!!

Fundraising Prize Program for Fall 2010 School Fundraising Announced...

I won't go into detail on here just yet but believe me when I say you have to make a call on this one. We've just announced the very best student prize program out there for fall 2010 school fundraising!

We will be offering 11 prize levels and although I really want to announce what they are here, I will wait just a few days. If you get a chance to and are interested in knowing more, call toll-free 1-877-723-5438 and get the low-down!

Elementary and middle school fundraising is going to look a lot better this fall!