Has anyone heard of Kidoodlez? Your childs art on a t-shirt, calendar, or note cards and envelopes! The school keeps $5.00 per order. It sounds preety neat.

Where are you located? I work for a company called Market Day a fundraising company, but only for a couple of months now. I started working for them because I LOVE the food they sell and the brochure items. I am a mom and on the PTA board so know what it is like dealing with fundraising. Let me know if I can help.

Thanks for pointing out the info for the Read-A-Thon, QueenBee...sounds like a great program!

Does your school have Accelerated Reader? Our library and teachers have run this program for years, which is a contest with prizes, so I'm afraid a Read-A-thon, in our case, would be a little excessive. But it's a great idea for schools that don't have AR!!!

Morning!

Check out the Read-a-Thon post on the message board. I know of a school who makes like $50,000 on their R-A-Thon, and it's their only fundraiser. It does come with some work, but since you put the program and prizes together yourself, you're not paying out any profit to another group. I love the concept for several reasons:

it's educational (makes it much easier for parents and teachers to get behind it!)

most prizes are donated.

the 'big' prizes are awarded for top readers and top earners (love this!)

t-shirt pledge "level" is set around $25 and almost all participants will earn a t-shirt. (Corporate sponsors can be printed on tees as well)

2 evening assemblies (one for kickoff and one for prizes) give your group an opportunity to bump elbows with other parents and kids.

It's a good thing all the way around! All the info I have is posted under the Read-A-Thon Post in the Fundraising section

I think thats a fantastic program, and $150 donated cash to a non profit, is about $100 out of pocket to the taxpayer, depending on bracket, and the shcool gets all $150 of it, as you said.

But if buy $150 over the school yr, worth of cookie dough, magnets, and plants or wahtever, i CANNOT take a tax write off since i am receiving a product in return. And the school gets only a fraction of my money.

ANd last but not least, lots less headache and time and effort, for the PTO 'staff' than running many many fundraisiers thruout the year!

Sounds like a WIN WIN situation.
THANKS for all the info.

Originally posted by Brooke Pickard:
I'd love to see your documentation for the Booster Club, prez.

I'm starting up a program this year that will absorb Adopt-A-Class and just make all the monies coming and going from personal and private donatiions a lot "cleaner" and with ample recognition everyone.

Being able to see someone else's structure would be a HUGE help!

E Mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Thanks!

I thought I'd put additional information on here, in case others are interested too.

The '06-'07 school year will be our third as a Booster Club. I remember when it was first proposed to the school families, in the form of a survey, I looked through my checkbook to see how much I'd spent on fundraisers throughout the year. It was over $250! So a onetime payment of $125 seemed like a real steal, and I knew that all of the money would be going right to the schools.

Our first year, we raised about $35,000, and we had about 30% school participation. Last year, our second year, I mentioned our results in the previous post. I think the improvement in numbers came from better educating our families on the new concept.

We started our membership drive on the first day of the school year, by sending out "pitch packets" to all families. This consisted of a membership form, the various levels available, and all that we'd accomplished for the schools in the previous year. We set a deadline for completion, as one of the benefits of membership is a comprehensive school directory and we needed to get it to print so that it had some usefulness for the members that year. The first year the PTO board gave out "goodies" if you joined...a tote bag, a magnet, a pen, I think...as incentives to join. Last year we decided that the incentives were too costly, so we got rid of them. As you can tell by our numbers, it didn't affect our fundraising one bit. But the incentives were a good idea for our initial year, just to get things rolling.

Our corporate sponsors and/or families who donate at the $400 or $1500 levels get added recognition. Their names appear on the back of every backpack flyer that goes out. We have a huge banner made every year, with all sponsors names and/or logos on it, which hangs in the school halls. Our newsletters always mention them too. At the $1500 level, the sponsors name is attached to an assembly or program of their choice. When the flyer goes out for the program, the bottom reads "Brought to our students through the generous support of ABC Company". Their name is prominent at the assembly too. We also post the program on our district cable channel, along with the sponsors name. When the local newspaper comes to take pictures of the program, their name is included there too.

At the end of the year, we take out a full-page ad in the paper, thanking every member for their contributions. We also send them a personal thank you, as record of receipt for tax purposes, as we are a 501(c) 3 organization.

Anything else I can answer?