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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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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With the school year rapidly approaching, it’s the perfect time to make sure you have a questionnaire form ready to go home with students on the first day or two of school. This questionnaire is for the parents to fill out and it could prove to be the most important document you produce all year.

I’m talking about the volunteer interest and skills form.

If your school hasn’t sent such a form out in the past, I strongly recommend that you absolutely do so this year.

Now, I have four kids in school, so I see a lot of paperwork coming home. It’s very easy to let one form slip through the cracks and not send it back in. However, I believe that this questionnaire is so important, the teachers need to place some sort of requirement on it. For instance, they could require that this form be signed and returned by parents by a certain date.

The main purpose of this form is to find out the following information:

• The names of the student’s parents

• All their contact information, including email and other online addresses

• What the parent’s occupations are

• What their hobbies/interests are

• If they have any special skills, like woodworking or artistic talent

• If they’ve volunteered in the past, and if so, what did they do

• If they are active online with social media sites like Twitter or Facebook

• If they are active texters and if they mind receiving texts from the school

I would also create a list of all the possible volunteer jobs that will come up during the year. Whatever fundraisers or other school activities you run, break them down into the volunteer positions they require. Ask the parents to check all the opportunities that would interest them.

You need to shoot for 100% completion/return rate. Unless there is a very special circumstance with a student’s family situation, you should follow up with any students who do not turn in their forms.

Then the next vital step in this process is to RECORD all this vital information into a database that you will actually reference and use. If you can’t quickly access this information, it is worthless. But, if you need to quickly mobilize a work force or find out who can build a set for the school play, you’ll have all that info at your fingertips.

So, with about a month to go before many schools start, take a hard look at how you’re going to collect all the vital information you’ll need to be successful in your fundraising efforts all year long.

Photo by: SMJJP

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When planning your school carnival, you may find yourself in a situation where you’re having trouble coming up with enough volunteers, due to the high number needed. At this point, you may consider recruiting older children, perhaps middle school or high school age to fill the gaps.

I think this is a fine solution to your problem, as long as you are able to give the student-helpers strong direction and supervision. While this may be a stereotype against young people, many of them do not have extensive experience in customer service or even a work history whatsoever.

Be very clear in your instructions and expectations.

As a precaution, you should be very clear with them that while they are on duty, their first priority is the entertainment of the children. Therefore, no cell phones or other electronic devices may be used while they are “working”.

Also, instruction should be given on your expectations for how to talk to customers. Each worker should greet the children and their parents with a friendly hello and continue to be polite and welcoming throughout the families’ entire experience.

Ask the student helpers to put themselves in the place of the parents.

Explain to the student-helpers that if a parent feels his or her child is not being made to feel welcome, the parent may start to develop negative feelings about the entire event. As a result, that parent may spend less money at the carnival and could even leave early, before other money-spending opportunities, such as the basket auction, have even begun.
I would also insist on having a dress code for all the volunteers. If you apply the restrictions to everyone, the teens won’t feel singled out.

To be fair, I have worked with many young people who have had vastly superior customer service skills than most adults. So, please don’t get me wrong. Teenagers could be a terrific asset to your carnival. I’m only advising you not to assume too much and be prepared to teach some things that you might actually take for granted.

Your Turn

Do you have any ideas on the subject of letting teen-agers work for your school carnival?  What’s your experience been like?  Please share with us in our comment section!  Thanks!

Photo by: St Peter’s Community News

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One of the most difficult tasks a school fundraiser has is getting parents involved and helping out.

PTO groups across America struggle with how to spread the workload over many hands.

One of the ways some groups try to recruit volunteers is to offer prizes of some kind. For instance, a PTO might announce that they will be holding a drawing at the next meeting for a $10 gift card to Applebee’s.

Or another group might give actual tickets out to those who attend meetings during the year. At the end of the year, you put all your tickets into a bucket and a winner is selected for a bigger prize than just dinner. The more meetings you attend, the more tickets you have in the bucket and the greater your chances of winning.

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

I’ve even read about a parent-teacher group (from the PTO Today message boards) that got permission from the principal to hand out “homework passes” that would excuse a student from a regular homework assignment. The only way to get these passes were for parents to attend the meetings.

But, is this system actually a good idea? continue reading

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