Question: Fundraising

I have a student who submitted in a fundraiser but the PTO never received it. Since the payment was both cash and check, how do we go about rectifying this?

Asked by kathys kids

Answers:

Community Advice

mum24kids writes:
I can imagine so many possibilities as to what happened with the money.... Assuming you are asking as a committee chair or officer of the PTO, I don't think the PTO is responsible here, unless there is some overwhelming evidence that it was turned in to a representative of the PTO and the PTO lost it. Assuming that's not the case, I think the parents need to inform the people who wrote checks so that they can decide whether to stop payment, and reimburse the people who paid cash.

For years and years, we would get stories about things that were supposedly turned in and we never got it. Invariably, a day or two after the last day of school, envelopes to the PTO would show up in our mail bin at school with orders for yearbooks, contributions to the fall fundraiser, afterschool class registration, etc., etc., that were found behind bookshelves in classrooms, stuffed away in the back of desks, found at the bottom of backpacks, and in all other kinds of weird places where they had been misplaced during the school year and only found once everyone cleared out stuff on the last day of school. We switched to a system where we take online credit card payments for almost everything we do, and put notices on everything that says "do not send cash in to school." We now rarely, if ever, get cash.

Community Advice

admobile writes:
Parents are burned out with selling, collecting money and distributing products. AdMobile created a unique idea where parents trade off doing all that for receiving a few text ads per day. It doesn't cost the fundraiser or parents any money. The money is made when ads are sold to businesses who like the idea of sending their coupons, promotions, etc. to the parents' mobile phones via text. Fundraisers don't even really sell the ad. They just refer the advertiser to AdMobile who manages the advertisers, collects the ad revenue and pays the fundraisers. All the fundraiser has to do is have their supporters subscribe via text and show an app about the advertising to advertisers.