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Fundraising

Sooner or later, the club is going to run out of grant capital. Grants are great for getting started, but the best way to feed the need for additional equipment is to do some fundraising. Fundraising does not necessarily need to be difficult or unpleasant. I have listed a few of my favorite fundraisers below to help your club start thinking about novel ways to raise funds. If you have any other fundraising ideas, I would love to add them to my list.

Valentines Day Matches

One of the best fundraisers I have every done was selling the St. Valentines Day Fundraiser.com's Match Maker results. Students took a 50 question survey a few weeks in advance and we sent the results off to Fundraiser.com Fundraiser.com gets one dollar per sheet sold and anything charged over that price becomes profit for the club. We sold the results starting at two dollars each for the first two days and then price went up by a dollar during the remaining 3 days of the fundraiser. The students all wanted their results and the fundraiser went very smoothly. Fundraiser.com is a good company to work with and when the fundraiser was over, we threw out any results that didn't sell, which left no leftover product to deal with and about $800.00 of funds raised at lunch times over five days.

Rake And Run

Another fundraiser that has worked well for me when I was working with similar groups who need funding is the Saturday Morning Rake and Run. We live in a small town and in the fall, the leaves all need to be raked to the street, no bags required. We send out flyers a few weeks before our chosen Saturday and request that folks call us ahead of time if they would like us to come rake their yards. We only do the folks in town and after raking the lawn, we take at least the minimum donation. It only lasts for part of a fall Saturday morning and the kids break up into teams of 10 or more and hit all the lawns as fast as possible. 12 kids with rakes make short work of a city sized lot and the home owners always say how nice it is to see kids actually "doing some work" to earn their funds.