Fundraisers That Work

The news here in Oregon is that the budget is shot. In fact, schools could close 2 weeks early. All budgets are frozen. Obviously, coaches are in a huge financial pickle……..not only here, but similar things are taking place all across America.

When I coached here, we never really had an account in the first place and therefore had to think of ways to get the money to get the equipment to get the job done. We would have to fundraise to book a clinic every year for the athletes to hear the BFS Story from the best, buy equipment, go to camp, and use money fro lots of team functions. The kids would hear the message, go to work, it made a positive difference in their performance, and the people of the community would feel good about supporting the fundraiser because of the positive program results and the whole thing became mutually reinforcing.

The purpose of the EQualizer Group board is to share and help each other with ideas and programs that work. I propose that we share ideas on Fundraisers That Work. Post up fundraisers that you have done that have raised money, not nickels and dimes, but thousands of dollars that can be easily reproduced by coaches across the country. We are not talking Gold Cards here since this is not the traditional start time for Gold Cards and probably has been already done. A fundraiser that we would do every year that raised enough funds to book our clinic, equipment and camp was:

Every woman in Town wants to have her windows washed in the spring, and every man in town does not want to do it. So we organized to do it. We set a weekend date for the project. Put a mother in charge of take phone orders; advertised what we were going to do; go door to door in the neighborhood to make washing appointment; on the day of we broke the team down into groups that would take a neighborhood each having an adult supervisor for the team; supply them with buckets & brushes and other necessary equipment from Home Depot, and go out and get the job done. The community loved it because they saw the players actively engaged in an activity that was a win-win. They almost viewed it as community service – that’s how dreaded window washing is.

We had a standard charge for the standard house (5 years ago it was $30-should be closer to $50 now). Bigger houses had a larger charge. We had some people in big houses on the hill with lots of large windows that would pay hundreds of dollars ($300)to get their windows washed. It got to the point that people would call up and ask, “When are you guys going to wash windows? Put me on the list.”

If you would organize your team on this project, once in the spring and once in the fall, you will raise thousands of dollars, elevated your team’s standing in the community, raise enough money to pay for your program & Be An 11 Clinics, pay for some needed equipment needed in your weightroom and have some left over for other needs.

Two other successful fundraisers that were conducted when I was in Wyoming (high desert, right?) is with fruit boxes and seafood boxes – two different campaigns at different times of the year. The team would pre-sell boxes of fruit from Florida or flash frozen seafood from Alaska. There would be a truck that would show up on a given weekend, the kids would show up and deliver the boxes ordered. Thousands of dollars were raised with each of these. I will go to work on contacting suppliers for these.

And yet another classic fundraiser we would conduct during the spring of the year: Rent A Ranger or have a slave auction of the players who would then show up at the buyers house to do the spring clean up work or whatever the people wanted.