I know, I know. Writing for this school fundraising blog, I should be right on top of it. Scissors in a holster, ready to clip at a moment’s notice. Right?

Well, sadly, I am not that guy. Sometimes I remember, but usually only when my kids notice one and bug me to cut it out.

So, I need to get better at this. I know how important these little box tops can be when they are all combined together with everybody else’s box tops. I should be doing my part.

Then I thought that it might help to go to the Box Tops 4 Education website and see what kind of inspiration they can give me. They actually have all sorts of great information that can get folks like me fired up to start cutting out every box top in the house. They even suggest going to other people’s houses (like grandma or Great Aunt Sue) to clip out their box tops, too!

If you don’t believe in the power of box tops, here is a success story I found on their site.

A New Jersey elementary school’s creativity engages parents and raises cash

The kids had a choice: Would they prefer to see their principal and their gym teacher race down the hallway on scooters or fight each other in inflated sumo wrestler costumes?

Sumo wrestling prevailed. Kids were admitted for free (but getting a racing-or-wrestling ballot required turning in 25 Box Tops), and their parents—hundreds of them–paid a $2 admission fee. Adding in concession sales, the evening netted $1,000 to buy educational equipment.

It’s one of many ways in which H & M Potter Elementary School in Bayville, N.J., has kept the community actively involved in the Box Tops program. They hold monthly contests—some suggested by others, some of their own design. (“We like to keep it new, not do the same thing over and over again,” says the principal, Jeffery Z.) Contest winners are lavished with attention, as are the advanced teaching tools bought with Box Tops earnings—interactive whiteboards, digital projector systems, etc.—in the school newsletter as well as at PTA meetings and other school events.

Bayville is a low-income area, and the parents have embraced the chance to contribute to their kids’ education through Box Tops. They hand in bags stuffed with Box Tops, and once a contest has ended they seek out Principal Z. for details about the next one. A parent employed by public works is known to Dumpster-dive to retrieve unclaimed Box Tops. The school has gotten senior centers and other community locales collecting Box Tops on its behalf. In 2008-09, the school earned more than $7,800 from its participation in Box Tops for Education.

“In an era that we’re losing funding for programming,” Principal Z. says, “this is really critical for keeping the school afloat.”

This could happen at your school. All you have to do it have some passion, a vision, and a will to inspire everyone to keep clipping!

If you’ve never been to the Box Tops 4 Education website, I highly suggest you give it a look. They have a great forum section, with all sorts of advice for those interested in school fundraising.

FactoryFunding.com is an established business that can help you raise significant revenue without asking parents to keep chipping in. They do this through an effective recycling program that includes ink jet cartridges, laser toner cartridges, cell phones, MP3 players and all sorts of personal electronics. A complete list of the qualifying items can be seen here.

Here is how FactoryFunding works:

Click here to enroll in Jim Berigan’s FREE year-long school fundraising e-Course!

When you recycle your used ink cartridges, cell phones, laptops, and small electronics with FundingFactory, your recyclables convert to cash and rewards that can get your school or nonprofit organization the things you need — for free.

Getting Business Supporters for your recycling program makes raising funds even easier. Schools and nonprofits with supporting organizations in their communities report more than 3 times the cash and rewards earned than organizations without Business Supporters.

We inspect every item we receive to determine whether it can be recycled or remanufactured — two states that account for 98% of the materials we process.

Collectively, FundingFactory participants have stopped 21 million pounds of waste from being landfilled.

Here are a few success stories from schools that have signed up for and have used FactoryFunding.com:

This video is from the West Boylston school district in Massachusetts.  They have raised $40,686 from FundingFactory.com

This second video is from Elk County Catholic school system.  They have raised $24,210 from FactoryFunding.com.

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:

We were able to catch up with a participant in the program to get some feedback. Sue, a member of the West Corner Campus Parent Teacher Association (PTA) in Endicott, New York, has raised over $100 since she signed up with Funding Factory, recently. She provided some great feedback on how to use this fundraiser in your organization.

Signup

To sign up for the service, just go to the Funding Factory website. There, you will fill out a simple form to get started. They then send you a starter kit for collection of ink cartridges and cell phone batteries. “The signup process was very easy, and if you ever have questions, you just email your representative,” Sue says. “They get back to you ASAP!”

Getting Participation

Sue says she has a hard time getting people to participate initially, but once they do cartridges come in on a regular basis. Right now, they have about a 10 percent participation rate from the PTA members.

To increase participation, Sue has advertised in the PTA newsletter, and reminders go home with students on a regular basis. She also sends reminders to the teachers and staff at the school to bring their cartridges.

The struggle for participation among so many other activities and fundraisers can be hard, but Sue says you must be persistent. She recommends consistent advertising at meetings, frequent reminder notices and hanging posters.

“Also, ask parents to ask their places of employment for cell phones, laser cartridges and ink cartridges,” Sue says. “I am getting the word out for that, too, and am having success!”
Other Advice

Have a support group. “I have a great group of PTA members who help me when I need it,” she says. “Keep track of donations on a spreadsheet [for simplicity].”

“I will continue to do Funding Factory,” Sue says. “What money I raise for our PTA may not be a lot, but every little bit helps. These cartridges are trash, and to see it turn into cash amazes me! It’s a lot of work, sometimes, but the kids are worth it.”

Here is a very simple way to raise money at your school without much effort- My Coke Rewards from Coca-Cola.

The idea is simple. You sign up for a “My Coke Rewards” account. You become the account manager. You will have access to check your account and trade in your “points” for items for your school.

Then, let everyone in your school community know that if they drink a participating Coke product (Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Sprite, Dasani water, Fanta, Mr. Pibb’s, Fresca, Minute Maid Lemonade, Vault, Powerade, and Barq’s Root Beer) they should donate the bottle cap (with the code printed on the underside of it ) to your school. Also, be sure to remind them that they cannot enter the code in themselves prior to giving it to you. It must be un-entered for it to have value to the school. (No double-dipping!)

As the account manager, you will receive a catalog with all sorts of great items that will benefit your school, such as sporting goods, creative supplies, and textbooks, to name just a few.

It would be wise to find a volunteer (or you can do it yourself, I suppose) to do the work of entering in all the codes to the Coke website.  Other than that, the work required is very minimal.

This whole process is very similar to Box Tops and Campbell Soup Labels. The key is to promote the program within your community and get as many people participating as possible. Since people drink a lot of soda, this shouldn’t be that hard.

This is a program that can run twelve months, non-stop. Make a big splash at the beginning of the school year to get people thinking about it, and you can collect this points all year round, including the summer, when soft drinks are flying off the shelves.

As I have written before, there are many people who never participate in any of your school fundraisers. Of this group, some may just feel they don’t have the extra money to donate. But, these folks most likely are buying products with redeemable labels. Convince them that they CAN make a real difference by staying vigilant with turning in their labels each month. This will let them feel as though they are contributing in a meaningful way and may ultimately lead to them take a larger role at school.

For those of you who live in states that have bottle deposit laws (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont), the Coke Rewards program is doubly terrific, because if the families give you both the cap and the bottle, you can return the bottle for cash (five or ten cents , depending on the state) and the cap for prizes! But, of course, families can elect to just give you the cap and save the return deposit for themselves. However, if you live in any of these states, you should definitely make a play for both.

Photo By: Dominic’s Pics

I realize that this makes me incredibly lame, but even though I’m pretty awful at this activity, it’s not that I don’t appreciate it. Because I do. I’m quite impressed by the folks who excel at this. Back in April of 2007, a 13 year-old girl named Morgan Pozgar became the first-ever National Texting Champion and won $25,000 for being able to send a 151 character message in 42 seconds. Amazing. After winning the prize, Morgan reported that she sends over 4,000 text messages per month! That works out to over eight messages every waking hour of the month.

Anyway, the point is, texting has arrived.

So, I was understandably intrigued when I recently learned about an upcoming fundraiser to be held in New Jersey that was using cell phone text messaging as the main hook for raising $100,000. The one-day event is scheduled for February 28, 2008. (There is a great article on the plan here.) The beneficiary for this event is a brain trauma center, not a school, but I think the steps could easily be transferred to a school setting.

The event is called “Text for 10”, and it works like this: The group has recruited 1,000 teens and ‘tweens to form 100 teams of 10 people each. Each individual has promised to be responsible for getting 10 pledges of at least $10. Basically it is 1,000 people getting $100 for a total of $100,000. Possibly more.

At exactly 6:00pm on February 28, all the 1,000 team members will simultaneously text in the pledges they received for donations. Then on “Bank Day”, which is March 5, the captains of each team will deliver the money to a secure bank location.

The organizer of the event realizes that this is basically a variation on the old walk-a-thon event, but she is updating it for today’s youth, for many of whom texting is a part of everyday life. She is using the hook of text messaging as a way to access a segment of the population who might not otherwise get involved for a fundraising event.

She is also using the novelty of the event to her advantage with public relations. There have been teams of recruits form, just because they heard about it locally.

As of this post, there are still a few weeks until the texting party begins. I’m guessing that teams have already been formed and are now busy lining up support. Sometime after the conclusion of this fundraiser, I will re-visit this event and share with you how they did.

Stay tuned!

Find out about this and other Box Tops promotions

Find out more about this special offer

From the Official Rules:

How to Enter: Online sweepstakes only. To enter, go to: www.boxtops4education.com/CouponsPromotions and click on the Chex Mix Bonus Box Tops Sweepstakes link in the Box Tops Coupons and Promotions section, complete and submit the online sweepstakes entry form during the sweepstakes period which begins at 12:01 A.M. (central time) on Wednesday, August 1, 2007 and ends at 11:59 P.M. Monday, September 3.

Sweepstakes entry limited to one entry per person per e-mail address. Sponsor will not verify receipt of entries. Automated entries are prohibited, and any use of such automated devices or programs will cause disqualification. Sponsor and its advertising and promotion agencies are not responsible for lost, late, illegible, misdirected or stolen entries or transmissions, or problems of any kind whether mechanical, human or electronic. Sweepstakes entries are the property of Sponsor and will not be returned. Sweepstakes ends on September 3, 2007.

Prizes: Five (5) Prizes of twenty thousand (20,000) Bonus Box Tops will be awarded to winner’s designated school. Retail value of prize is $2,000 to designated school. Individuals cannot redeem Bonus Box Tops certificate for cash.

Enter now »