Rating the Clip-and-Save Fundraisers

Russ Townsend is a good sport. The sixth-grade teacher from Aberdeen, S.D., found himself duct taped to the cafeteria wall for two hours recently after students at Simmons Middle School reached their Campbell’s Labels for Education fundraising goal.

After months of collecting, the help of dozens of students and several teachers, and five full rolls of duct tape, the labels program was complete. The glowing newspaper reports of the celebration talked about how Simmons would now be able to get computer software, playground equipment, and other items from the (program) for the school.

The little known fact, though, is that for all of Simmons work, the group earned enough for about $22 of prize value. And that’s before deducting the cost of shipping labels, labor and, yes, even duct tape. Celebrate team work and have some fun? Yes. Celebrate the Campbell’s program? No way.

The bad news: Tens of thousands of other groups are still running the Campbell’s program, with all of its requisite effort and cost, and seeing similarly weak returns. The good news: There are several other much better, much more lucrative clip-and-save programs for schools that really are worth your time and effort.

How can you tell which programs should make your cut? What follows is PTO Today’s detailed rundown on the most popular programs, a description of how we assess each one, our exclusive program grades, and some tips for matching your school to the best programs for you.

A Growing Tradition

Campbell’s Labels for Education is the oldest of the many collecting programs available to schools. Founded in 1973, it has returned nearly $100 million worth of equipment to schools nationwide. And Campbell’s deserves praise for the spirit of the program. Here at PTO Today, we love companies that give back to schools. Remember, all of these companies could choose to run another 30-second ad or throw one of the corporate world’s infamous million-dollar birthday parties.

Done well, these programs can be models of successful school/business partnerships, where companies support schools and in return gain recognition and marketing support as good corporate citizens. Its a concept known as cause marketing, and more and more companies now understand that connecting their brands to a worthwhile effort like helping schools can be a win-win for all involved.

But old age and good intentions are no longer enough in a landscape dotted with competitive cause marketing programs and in a world where parent groups have to fight for the attention of average parents. Today, parent groups need to use a critical eye when determining which programs are right for their school.

Compare Campbell’s progress to the progress of General Mills upstart Box Tops for Education program. The cereal giant has returned that same $100 million, but in only seven years and with fewer schools participating during several of those years. Add in the fact that the Box Tops program provides better marketing support, better customer service, a whole host of coordinator tools unavailable to Labels leaders, and a deeper list of eligible products, and you can see that all programs are not created equal.

With a nod toward the Campbell’s tradition and an envious look at the sudden success of Box Tops, more and more marketers have entered the fray in recent years. Read on for details of traditional clip-and-save offerings from Tyson, Foster Farms, Advance Brands, and Best Choice, as well as similar options from some of the nations largest grocers and shopping mall chains.

The result is a sometimes confusing array of claims and options for parent groups to sort through.

Too Much of a Good Thing

We hear often that all free money is good money and that in this day of ever-tightening school budgets, schools shouldn’t turn down even a single dollar. We disagree. Running too many programs or running the wrong programs can do real harm to your school. Let’s look at three ways this can happen.

1. Fundraising Overkill. Has your group ever been accused of being nothing more than a fundraising machine? And does this turn off some parents? Sending out flyers and adding paragraphs to your newsletter about every program under the sun can really exacerbate this reputation. Is it worth turning off 25 percent of your parents for $25?

2. Loss of Valuable Volunteers. Volunteers are so hard to come by; you should make every effort to find valuable, worthwhile work for willing parents. We can think of a thousand better uses for a volunteer’s time—how about reading books to children or creating bulletin board decorations at home?—than cutting, clipping, sorting, counting, and shipping. (Use string only and corrugated boxes, directs the oh-so-helpful Campbell’s website.) Even if you make $60 or $100 in Campbell’s earnings after a full year of work, is that enough relative to the volunteer time committed?

3. Attention Loss. The average parents at your school are a busy lot—you know this already. They read and really take in maybe half of the messages your group sends out. Every less important message you send reduces the likelihood of your more important messages hitting home. Every newsletter paragraph devoted to Advance Brands or Campbell’s, two of our least favorite programs, takes attention away from a parent involvement message or even from a much better fundraiser. Attention spent on a poor program can mean fewer attendees at an involvement event or lower profits on a more worthwhile fundraiser. Is it worth it? No.

Rating the Programs

When we first rated the free money or collecting programs four years ago, we described our exclusive ratings formula called the Work-Reward Equation. Basically, we looked at how much work it took to run a certain program well relative to the amount of reward your group could expect to receive from the program. Low work, high reward equals great program. High work, low reward equals poor program.

In the years since, we’ve added a third piece to the formula: attention. The added measure in the Work-Reward-Attention Equation takes into account how much of the promotional work is done for you by the sponsoring company.

General Mills, for example, promotes the Box Tops program prominently on hundreds of million of very popular packages. Its hard for a parent to miss, and even with no work from your group, you’re likely to see Box Tops piling up at the school office. Campbell’s, too, makes a strong effort to get its program front and center for consumers, despite the fact that a soup label is small and the Labels program logo is even smaller.

But look at a program like Advance Brands Home Team School Rewards, with far fewer eligible products and virtually no marketing support. If you have any intention of making this program work, the entire promotional burden will fall to your group. You would have to be a fundraising miracle worker to see any significant returns. Remember, every promotion you send out means that more important messages may get lost in the clutter.

This third piece of the equation is a killer for programs like Advance Brands that don’t have an extensive product list or high brand recognition. In effect your group, through your own communications with parents, is asked to make up for what those brands lack in profile. Not a good deal.

The Scorecard

Box Tops for Education: A
The Company: General Mills
The Offer: 10 cents per participating Box Top. Hundreds of products. High annual limits.
The Skinny: These guys have truly figured this stuff out over seven years. The best coordinator materials, by far. New, strong brands each year. Heavy promotional support through product tagging and consumer advertising. More and more groups making significant dollars ($1,000-plus). The best of the bunch by far.

Grocery Store Receipts: A
The Offer: Varies by grocer, often 1 percent of receipts.
The Skinny: These programs are almost always worthwhile, simply because parents spend so much money at the grocery store. Even a very small percentage return can add up to big dollars. More and more grocers are connecting these programs to frequent shopper cards (or connecting with credit cards like eScrip), reducing coordinator work even further. One bad trend: It seems that some grocers are looking to limit their payouts by capping school earnings or, worse yet, by pitting schools against schools for a percentage of a set pot of earnings. For stores where schools must compete, the grade drops to a B.

Mall Receipts: C
The Offer: Schools compete. The school with the highest dollar value of receipts collected wins first place. Competing schools split a set pot, often $3,000 to $10,000. First place gets most of the money, while lower performers get a nominal amount or nothing at all.
The Skinny: These programs are often much better for the malls than the schools, with some exceptions. If the mall limits the number of participating schools and you can get a slot, go for it. If an unlimited number of schools are allowed to participate, don’t bother. You’ve got better ways to spend your time (and attention!) than on the possibility of maybe a nice reward. Better to buy a lottery ticket. If your school has better than average support—your Box Tops program always excels, for example—then you’re likely to fare well in a mall program, too. If you struggle with support in other endeavors, then a mall program could be an exercise in frustration with no guaranteed pay-out.

Fostering Education: C
The Company: Foster Farms
The Offer: Only in the Pacific Northwest. 10 cents to 35 cents per participating product.
The Skinny: Its still chicken and the number of products is limited, which limits the reward. But these guys are trying hard. They offer nice coordinator tools, and consumers can enter program codes on-line, eliminating the collection step and lowering the workload for groups. The variable returns, from a dime up to a nice 35 cents, can add up.

Project A+: C-
The Company: Tyson
The Offer: 24 cents per participating UPC. $12,000 limit per calendar year.
The Skinny: A valiant effort and a generous offer, but it doesn’t seem to be catching on. The limited product selection—compare the number of eligible UPCs from Campbell’s or Box Tops to Tyson—seems to be the problem. Perhaps Tyson could partner with another brand to expand options. We hope so; that would definitely help. In the meantime this program is too limited to earn a higher grade.

Save-A-Label: D
The Company: Best Choice
The Offer: $30 in cash for each 1,000 UPCs you redeem—3 cents per UPC, must be submitted in batches of 1,000.
The Skinny: Best Choice is the store brand at a whole host of groceries and thus has quite a few eligible products. The 3-cent return and the program-slanted (as opposed to school-slanted) rules are hard to get past. If your local grocer is promoting this really loudly, it might be worth it. Very few are. If Best Choice got serious about the program and really got grocer partners involved, there could be something here.

Labels for Education: D-
The Company: Campbell’s
The Offer: Approximately 1 cent (yes one penny!) per label collected. Bonus labels and special offers can increase this.
The Skinny: Just dump Campbell’s! The program has made some strides in recent years. Bonus offers—for example, double credits for certain products or 100 extra label credits for shopping at a certain chain—have helped groups earn a bit more. And Campbell’s has been promoting the program more heavily (Olympian Sarah Hughes can be seen in Sunday newspaper inserts). But we cant see a day when the penny-per-label model changes, mainly because a can of soup still costs under a buck. Campbell’s cant give much more, and a penny just isn’t enough. Program rules remain heavily pro-Campbell’s, and customer service still pales when compared to Box Tops and better programs.

Home Team School Rewards: F
The Company: Advance Brands
Offer: Clip Home Team logo from eligible product bags; earn 10 cents per logo. Minimum 500 logos per submission.
The Skinny: Run away. Lots of work and not much reward. We’ve yet to see a school report big success. Nearly the entire promotional burden will fall on your group, as the company has very few coordinator tools available and does not promote the program loudly at all.

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Clip and Save Success

by Craig Bystrynski

Every November, Alabama becomes a house divided. Friend against friend. Husband against wife. Brother vs. brother. The source of all of this strife? The annual Iron Bowl football game. It pits two big state colleges against each other: Auburn University and the University of Alabama.

“Living here, it’s inbred,” says Gwen Lindsley, the Box Tops for Education program coordinator for Mountain Gap Elementary PTA in Huntsville. “You have to pick either one or the other, and everybody goes all out” to support their team.

Lindsley helps them do just that. Every fall she puts together a month-long Box Tops contest running up to the big game. The 400 kids at the K-5 school vote for their favorite team by placing Box Tops in decorated bins—one for Auburn and one for Bama. Every day she uses the school intercom to announce which team is ahead. Every day kids bring more Box Tops. During the contest last fall, the PTA collected 3,000 in all, worth $300 to the group from General Mills.

Such creativity has helped make Mountain Gap Elementary’s Box Tops program number two in the state. Three years ago, the PTA earned $100 collecting Box Tops. Two years ago, Lindsley’s first as coordinator, they earned $700. Last year, they boosted their earnings to $2,600 by collecting 26,000 Box Tops.

Lindsley runs three basic promotions.

• Monthly contests in which kids compete for prizes. She describes the prizes, donated by local businesses, as odds and ends. They range from bumper stickers from local radio stations to movie coupons to hockey sticks and basketballs donated by local minor league sports teams.
• Two competitions during the year: Auburn vs. Alabama in November and boys against girls in January or February.
• Promotions with supermarkets. The group collected 1,400 Box Tops from 5 to 8 p.m. on a Monday at a local Bruno’s grocery store. The store matched the collection with a donation to the parent group of $140.

Any child who submits 50 Box Tops during the year receives a prize. The top room for the year wins a pizza party. At the end of the year, each student is given a Ziplock bag labeled with the childs name and the new teachers name. A product list is attached. The bag reminds kids to collect during the summer and gives them a specific spot to save Box Tops all year. When a child has collected some Box Tops, he brings his bag to a collection box in the school office. The Box Tops are then counted, and the bag is returned to the child to be refilled.

The secret to success with a clip-and-save program like Box Tops, says Lindsley, is to “promote, promote, promote.” She makes in-school announcements every day while contests are running, she runs notices in the group newsletter, she places items in the local newspaper to announce supermarket nights, and the local paper has even written a feature about her program.

“The parents seem to respond to the fact that it's an easy fundraiser. The kids seem to respond more to the contests,” she says. For Box Tops specifically, she stresses the high value of the Box Tops, 10 cents apiece, and the significant amount of money the school can raise.

There's one more key to success, she says: Lots of reminders.

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