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!!