One of the goals at TopSchoolFundraisers.com is to provide our readers with excellent tools that will help you accomplish the hard task of fundraising with greater ease and efficiency.

One such excellent resource is a website called VolunteerSpot.com. The process of recruiting and managing volunteers can be a very stressful and confusing job. Just communicating to your families the individual tasks that need to be accomplished is difficult enough. If you need to assign volunteers to shifts, that gets even more complicated to keep track of.

But VolunteerSpot.com makes all these steps much easier. Here are a couple of video descriptions of what VolunteerSpot is and what it can do.

I have known and worked with Karen Bantuveris, the president and founder of VolunteerSpot, a few times over the past couple of years, and what she has built is absolutely amazing. In just a few short years, VolunteerSpot has managed more than 1.5 million volunteer hours performed by people all over the country, in all kinds of non-profit organizations.

On their site, you can download free e-books about popular non-profit topics, you can download a demo of the VolunteerSpot software, read their regularly updated blog, and learn how to sync your VolunteerSpot.com account from your computer to your smart phone, so you can have everything you need, right in your pocket!

Take a couple of minutes to visit their site and see how this awesome volunteer management program can revolutionize the way you communicate with your school families!

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With the beginning of a new school year, you want to get off to a good fundraising start. Fundraising, like many other things, is pretty much a sales job. You are trying to convince people to give you (the school) their money or for them to ask other people for money.

Therefore, you have to start out the right way. You want to build quality relationships and take things slowly. If you push too hard, right off the bat, you can easily lose the people you are trying to win over.

Because of all this, the fundraising activities you chose to start off with in the fall need to be easy for people to get on board with. They need to be low on the commitment scale, not as ambitious monetarily (which means a greater chance for success), and high with the fun factor.

I would strongly recommend staying away from the fundraisers that require large amounts of volunteers, lots of planning time, and a significant financial investment.

Here are some ideas for fundraisers that are just right for starting off the year.

Bake Sale- Bake sales are great for the start of the year, because, in my experience, so many people will volunteer to bake and donate cookies, brownies and the like. Most people have the ingredients lying around at home and it’s not a big deal to knock out a couple of dozen treats for a school bake sale. I’ve always had the most success with bake sales on Saturday mornings before big college football games. Reserve a spot outside the most popular supermarket in your town right before the big game, and you’ll turn a great profit.

Flamingo Flocking- Flamingo Flocking is a great way to raise some money for your school, have a lot of fun, and build a bunch of friendships. For a complete description of how to run a Flamingo Flocking Fundraiser, click here. But you should know that this type of fundraiser can tick all the boxes when it comes to low commitment and high fun.

Box Tops/Soup Labels – While these two items may seem to be old hat, they are still a great way to get parents into the good habits of thinking about school fundraising. Set up a good receptacle system, get teachers on board with reminding kids to bring them in, and send letters home to parents telling them about the ongoing program. Create monthly contests between classrooms to keep the box tops and labels coming in all year long. Start the good habits in the fall, and they will continue to produce revenue.

Fundraising cards- Another way to get parents working for you in a relatively easy manner is through fundraising cards. Here is a great video description of such a program offered by FastTrack Fundraising:

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The focus of my blog posts this month has been how to prepare for the upcoming school year, in terms of fundraising. One of the most important things you can do right now is to make sure your funds will remain safe all year long.

No matter where you fit in the fundraising team at your school, you should be very concerned with the possibility of your hard-earned savings being stolen by someone close to your organization.

I know this is very hard to wrap your head around, but incidents of embezzling PTO funds happen quite regularly. In fact, I woke up this morning to see this headline in my Google Alerts:

Woman accused of stealing from PTO booked: About $8K allegedly taken

Whenever these kinds of articles pop up, I always wonder how long the embezzling had been going on before it was discovered. How long did the other people in the school not know what was happening? How many times was an illegal check written and cashed? How many times was the petty cash drawer robbed before somebody figured out something was amiss?

For a figure of almost $8,000 to have been stolen, the embezzlement must have been going on for months, if not a couple of years.

That means, nobody was paying attention to the school finances for a very long time. It also means that the guilty party in this mess had unchecked access to the organization’s finances. Obviously, this was not smart.

So, the first thing I think you should do at your school is to find out who is in charge of the money. Is it just one person? If that’s the case, things have got to change immediately, for everybody’s sake. Checks should always have to be signed by more than one person. There should be monthly financial reports that are prepared by more than one person and then checked by another person altogether.

I also think that, even though parent-teacher organizations are separate from the school office, they should use the school’s money handling policies and guidelines.

For every instance that money is being transferred from one party to another in a school environment, you must have the most transparent process possible. If you don’t know what to do, go get advice from your bank or your accounting firm. Let the professionals set you on a course of financial best practices and security, so your school doesn’t end up like so many that have fallen victim.

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As we think about ways to get our fundraising plan in place for the coming school year, you will want to come up with strategies to get as many people as involved as possible.

This is, as I’m sure you are aware, a challenging thing to accomplish. People are busy, they get swept up with their own schedules, and volunteering in a classroom or cutting out box tops quickly become the last things they think about.

One of your jobs, as a fundraising volunteer, is to help the parents remember that they need to stay involved. There are many ways to do this, but today I want to focus on the very first step you should take in this ongoing task.

I believe that it very difficult to get people to think about volunteering until they actually know what they could specifically do. Since I’m a parent of four young children myself, I know that I get hit with dozens of fliers each year that advertise this volunteer opportunity or that. Sometimes, I’ll get three or four in quick succession, other times, I won’t see such a flier for months. I never know when I’ll be needed or what for. It’s always a surprise. And usually not a good one.

Therefore, I think it might be helpful, right off the bat, to create a master flier/letter that lists all the things parents can volunteer for throughout the year. You can include large items, like a school carnival or walk-a-thon that would be time specific, and non-specific fundraising activities like turning in grocery receipts for cash. The point is to lay out the whole plan for parents in one shot.

If you can be specific with dates and estimated time requirements, that would be very helpful too.

While a letter and checklist like this won’t guarantee a flood of volunteers, it is a very good first step in the ongoing battle to recruit people to lend a hand.

Photo by: Pnash

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I write a lot about fundraising, both in schools and with non-profit organizations. I’ve looked at the process of raising money from many different angles. One thing I’ve noticed that there is one particular human behavior that seems to pop up more frequently than any other when I hear about successful fundraisers.

That behavior is consistency.

It seems that many fundraising professionals or volunteers start off with great intentions in September. They have all sorts of documents ready to send home to parents, they’ve got their applications all in for the cash-back programs at the local supermarkets, they’ve made up attractive bulletin boards, they’ve developed some ideas to increase volunteerism, you name it- they’re ready.

But then, the school year starts, people get busy, a key volunteer drops out of sight, whatever. All those good intentions slip away and suddenly, the PTO newsletter is three months behind. When I see that happening, I can be pretty sure the school is not making the most it could be in their fundraising efforts.

So, as you are in the mode of planning your school fundraising calendar this year, I urge you to make consistency, sticking to your plan, your number one goal. It will support everything else that you do.

The best way to ensure your “stick-to-itiveness” is to have a strong support network, even if it’s just two or three people who will keep bringing up “old business”. It might help to rename “old business” to something more positive like “consistency issues”, but the point remains the same. You and your group need to keep up with all the projects you’ve started that are supposed to be on-going throughout the year, like newsletter publishing, bulletin board creating, Facebook updating, soup label collecting, returnable bottle accepting, and all the other things that aren’t time or date-specific.

The downside to being inconsistent in your projects is that parents won’t take you seriously in the long run. They know if you get all excited about something new, it will eventually lose its novelty and be tossed aside for the next amazing new thing.

I also think that by being consistent for the entire year, you’ll make more money. If you maintain a monthly push for soup labels and box tops, from September to June, you’ll make way more than if you start strong in September and peter out by Christmas.

I know this seems like very basic and obvious point, and it is, but really, it happens so much in schools, that I think it’s important to mention it here and do everything you can to guard against it.

Photo by: TooFarNorth’s photostream

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