I was reading an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune this morning about the dire straits that private schools are finding themselves in during this economic downturn. Parents are struggling to find ways to afford expensive tuition rates, and schools are seeing many families depart for the free option- public school.

As a former private school principal, I used to grapple with these same worries. So, I remember that over the summer one year, I sat down and brainstormed all the ways I could think of to keep our current students and even attract more.

As I mentioned at the top, not all of my ideas have been well-received.

So, I was thinking…

In our town, there are two public elementary schools that have approximately 500 students each. A HUGE number of these kids are driven to school and then picked up in the afternoon by parents. That means the line of cars before and after school stretches for blocks. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth in this town over the problem. I’ve heard parents say that they regularly wait 30 to 40 minutes just to pick up or drop off their child.

On the other hand, my little private school had a wait of approximately zero minutes. Parents really didn’t even have to stop- they could just slow down and the kids could jump out. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but you get the point. Pick up and drop off at my school was a breeze.

Hey! I thought, I could tell parents that there was no waiting and no lines over at our private school. I further thought, what if we assigned a dollar amount to people’s time. For argument sake, let’s say you decide your time is worth $10 per hour. Let’s also say you wait exactly one hour each day in the pick up/drop off line. In one week, that equals five hours, or $50! Our school year lasts 180 days, which comes to a grand total of $1,800! Can you believe that? Now, our tuition at the private school was $3,300 per year. If you take away the $1,800, your “bill” comes down to only $1,500! That’s over 50%! Now, you’re not really saving “real” money in my dreamed-up scenario, just time and frustration, but the quality of life is important, too!

Then I thought, I could ask the people who lived on the streets where the cars backed up, if I could stick some yard signs in their lawns saying something like, “If your kids went to — School, you’d already be at Starbucks” or something like that.

I thought it was brilliant. Unfortunately, nobody else did, and my dream of the perfect marketing slogan was crushed…  If anybody else out there appreciates my untapped genius, please feel free to run with this awesome plan!

Photo by: The Pug Father

Therefore, it is not surprising that I had as strong a reaction as I did last night when I found myself, as an innocent bystander, in a real-life fundraising disaster.

(For the sake of not hurting anyone’s feelings, I will not divulge any of the details about this organization.)

Recently, I signed my four year old daughter and my five year old daughter up for a sports-related activity. They had never pursued this kind of activity before, and they were quite excited. Last night was the fourth meeting of this group.

Just before the class started, the teacher walked over to me and handed me an envelope. “Here’s information on the fundraiser. It’s a raffle. Sell as many as you can and return the left-overs next week.”

Now, I don’t fault the teacher. She was a young girl, and she was just doing as she was told. Her job was to teach my daughters a new skill, not raise money for this non-profit organization. So, really, I want to let her off the hook. But I do have a few words for the people who are in charge.

Here are some of the things that I think were handled terribly and did not at all inspire me to go out and work for them.

First of all, I didn’t even realize that this group was a non-profit until I read the raffle ticket. There is absolutely nothing posted in the entrance way that details the group’s status or mission statement. We never received any kind of letter or pamphlet that welcomed us to the community and explained who they were.

Second, I had absolutely no idea that I would be expected to participate in a fundraising activity until the moment I was handed an envelope of raffle tickets. I felt it was incredibly offensive that they just assumed that would be okay to ask of me. They wanted me to spend my time to convince my friends and family to purchase these tickets and help them, but they didn’t think it was important enough to give me fair warning. Maybe all the other families expected this fundraiser to come up, but no one ever said anything to me about it.

Third, they only gave me a week to do this. What were they thinking? On the scale of priorities in my life, these lessons for my daughters don’t crack the top ten. Do they really think that I will re-order my life immediately to sell these tickets? If they do, they are being incredibly presumptuous.

Beyond the PR nightmare they created, I am also concerned by their lack of understanding of what a bad planning idea that is. What if I get really sick this week? What if I’m out of town? What if I have a cash crunch this week and can’t afford the tickets at this very minute? Giving a person only seven days to raise money is an elementary mistake.

Fourth, I really didn’t like the way the director of this group set up the staff. From the way it is handled, I could tell they were given no instruction, no advice on how to talk to parents, nothing other than “Just pass these out”. The girl who gave me my envelope of raffle tickets almost looked apologetic when she handed me the packet.

Now, again, I do this sort of stuff for a living, so I admit I am way more hypersensitive than your average person in matters like these. However, from my experience, I can make a fairly educated guess that this organization is raising only a fraction of what it could if they did things the right way.

And that’s really the point I’m making here. Fundraising is difficult. In a time when our economy is hurting and people are struggling, fundraising is even harder. If you really want people to help you, you’re going to have to do everything right. I just saw this situation with my daughters’ class as an example of a non-profit doing virtually nothing right.

I had a very clear mission: cut spending and raise revenue. Sound familiar?

One morning, as I was in my office, busy with carrying out this mission, I received a phone call from a very well-known national non-profit organization. The person on the line was asking us to conduct a fundraiser for them with our children. I thanked the woman for her call, and politely told her that our school wasn’t in a position at the moment to raise money for anybody other than ourselves. In fact, I added, we would greatly appreciate a donation from THEIR organization, and that my secretary would gladly take it from her.

Well, that didn’t go over very well, and the call ended.

Not too long after that, I was at our weekly teacher meeting, and one of the staff members asked if she could mount a mini-fundraising campaign for a Christian school in Romania that her church was sponsoring. Great cause. They needed things like books, paper, pencils, gym equipments, and the like. She wasn’t proposing much: a request letter sent home to parents and a change jar set up in her classroom for kids to deposit nickels, dimes, and quarters.

Again, it didn’t take long before somebody else on staff asked permission to put on a walk-a-thon for yet another nationally-known non-profit. The children would seek out pledges for how many miles they could walk “for the cause”. It would teach students to make sacrifices for others.

Fortunately, we didn’t have any families in that time whose house burned down or had a child with a terrible disease or else we would have been holding spaghetti dinners for them, as well.

Now, reading through this, I’m sure some of you are getting the impression that I’m a mean, uncaring guy. Honestly, sometimes I really felt that I was, too. As crazy as it sounds, it seemed to me that our little struggling non-profit had become a magnet for other non-profits in need of dollars. These groups were asking me to ask the families in my community to open their wallets, when I was doing the very same thing myself!

I felt it was my job, as a leader of the school, to be a “gatekeeper” and protect, if you will, my audience from being over-asked. On many occasions, I had parents say to me, “Enough with the ‘nickel and dime-ing’ me to death.” Or I’d hear comments like “Here we go again…” and “How much is it going to cost me this time…”. I became very sensitive to that.

In a previous blog post, I talked about setting up a master plan for your fundraising calendar for the year. One thing I did not mention in it specifically were these “pop-ups” that we all have to deal with. I wrote about the importance of crafting a plan, communicating it to your families, so they know what to expect, and then sticking to it. I really believe in that. I think you can do great harm to your community if you are throwing fundraisers at them with no plan.

But, the point of this post is not how to squeeze these “pop-ups” in between all of the other fundraisers you’ve planned, but it is, rather, a question of whether we should do them at all.

In this time, when schools are in serious financial need, should we even consider raising money for other groups? Is it ok to say to our families, “Look, I know we’re asking you to donate so many hundreds of dollars each year to the school, but now we’re going to ask you to give to this other charity over here, because it’s a really good cause. Don’t give too much though, because next month, we’ve got our annual auction, and we need you to pony up for that in a big way.”

When I’m the guy asking that question, I’m feeling a little uncomfortable.

Now, if one of your students does contract an awful disease and the family has no health insurance, of course you’re going to do what you can. Same thing if a student’s house burns down.

But, what about taking up a collection for another school in a third world country? Or a group working to cure cancer? Or a group who wants us to fill up a shoebox full of Christmas presents for poor kids around the world? These are all great causes, indeed.

Are schools the right place, however, for these groups to turn for help?

Once the news about the principal’s stand spread, he was contacted by a nationally known organization and given an award for his courageous decision.

The group? PETA- or “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”. The basketball players in question? Donkeys.

(This video from You Tube does not have any relation to the events mentioned in this article.  I only included it as a visual aid.) 

Yes, you read that right. As it turns out, there is such a thing as “Donkey Basketball” and more than a few groups around the country have used this activity to raise money for a variety of causes.

The author of this fundraising blog must confess to a terrible blind-spot in his industry-wide knowledge, for until this morning, I never knew such a thing even existed. But now, I am quite intrigued.

So, what does PETA have to say about Donkey basketball? I found this quote in the Chicago Tribune article which reported on this development. (Read the entire article here.)

According to Daniel Hauff, who is an animals-in-entertainment specialist in Chicago for PETA, “Donkeys used for such purposes sometimes travel in cramped trailers and may be abused in order to get them to cooperate. Although federal laws protect many animals from abuse, donkeys are not protected, so depending on the state, it can be legal to use them in such activities.”

Hauff went on to praise the school principal for his conviction. “He was concerned about his students and these animals. These animals are being forced to do something that is uncomfortable, probably confusing.”

PETA’s website actually went into greater detail about their views on this subject. “It’s hard to believe that something as absurd as “donkey basketball” still exists in this day and age, but sadly, it’s true. During these cruel “games”—which some schools hold as fundraisers—donkeys are dragged, kicked, and punched by participants who have no animal-handling experience. As if abusing animals and forcing them to participate in these games weren’t bad enough, there’s more: In order to keep them from having “accidents” on the court, donkeys are often deprived of food and water for hours before games. Donkeys are not protected by the federal Animal Welfare Act, and local humane agencies tend to be reluctant to get involved in cruelty cases involving donkeys, since employees typically don’t have any experience working with donkeys or any knowledge about them.”

Evidently, the national office of the Parent Teacher Association has also jumped on the anti-donkey basketball bandwagon. They have a statement on the PETA website that states, “Children trained to extend justice, kindness, and mercy to animals become more just, kind, and considerate in their [interactions] with each other.”

So, with all this hullabaloo out there against donkey basketball, I figured there had to be an organized group in favor of this “sport”. And there was- the companies that rent out their donkeys for the games. (Surprise!)

To be honest, I was able to find a woman- Bonnie Jo Campbell of Comstock, Michigan- who really loves donkeys. She raises her own and cares for them like family. She has a website, on which she wrote a 4,410 word essay about how much she loves donkeys. That’s seven pages typed- single spaced. She’s pretty serious about donkeys. You can read the text of this essay here (if you so desire) and you can learn about how impressed she was at the way the basketball-playing donkeys she’s known over the years have been treated. She sums up her essay with this quote (and I’m not kidding…) “If I were a donkey, I would prefer to live a life of leisure, hanging with my pals, play-fighting, rolling in sandpits and eating every thing I came across, but if I had to choose a career, I’d guess I’d seriously consider the basketball gig.”

So there you have it. What’s everybody getting so excited about?

From my reading and investigating, a typical financial arrangement between the school and the donkey owners is a 60-40 split with the donkey owners getting the sixty. If gate receipts top $3,000, the split goes to 50-50.

So, basically, it’s hard to imagine a game of donkey basketball really scoring that big for a school group. After all the time and effort you’d put into planning it, a 60-40 split isn’t that great. And, you have to assume that in this day and age, there is bound to be a group arise from your community who will vigorously oppose the activity, potentially giving your group a very bad public image.

Bottom-line: there are many other less abusive, less politically charged, and more profitable types of fundraisers you can pursue other than donkey basketball.