Connecting Schools With Great Fundraising Ideas.

When I started working at the Christian elementary school as principal, we faced serious financial challenges, as a majority of schools do in this country. We worked very hard to generate income through various fundraisers, through increased enrollment, and through alternate streams of revenue, such as renting our gym to a local church every Sunday morning and Wednesday evening.

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?

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