I am looking for ideas to help build participation in school fundraisers. The ideas can range from free to expensive, and the more creative the better.

What incentives, booster efforts, communication, etc. have you used to get more parents to participate?

With our major fundraisers, we make sure that we tell parents EXACTLY what the money will be used for. Instead of just saying that "your participation directly benefits the students" we say something like "your participation in XYZ Fundraiser is vital so that we can purchase ABC for our children" and then we go on to list some benefits that the students will get from whatever the purchase is.

The 2 things that work the best for us are daily student incentives and teacher incentives.

Either our fundraising company provides some little thing students can win for selling their first item (increasing participation) or for selling 5 items (increasing sales), or we buy something small and do it ourselves.

Many teachers either don't have the time or don't have the desire to remind kids to bring in their fundraiser or to try to sell at least one item, but when having a certain level of participation in their classroom means they get free stuff they're more likely to cooperate.

Good evening, I just received my October catalog from Rhode Island Novelty and the back cover offered a free Educational Website called Learn2Earn.com I signed my 3 kids up to this website and they haven't got off the site.

Hi-
Thought I'd jump in with some article suggestions that relate to fundraising participation.

School Fundraisers: Ideas and Help for School Fundraising

How PTOs Are Adapting to Hard Economic Times - PTOToday.com

~Lisa

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Good evening, I just received my October catalog from Rhode Island Novelty and the back cover offered a free Educational Website called Learn2Earn.com I signed my 3 kids up to this website and they haven't got off the site.

num1mom,

I just visited learn2earn.com for myself and it looks like a really great site. My kids (grade 3 and 5) haven't seen it yet, but I'm pretty sure that when I show them tonight they will be all over it.

Thanks for the heads up!