High School Fundraising: Promoting Your Fundraiser So People Actually Know to Give You Money

A tree falls in the woods, but nobody knows about it.

Does that tree sell enough cookie dough for Sticky Pinecone High to build a new log cabin gymnasium?  Probably not.

Does this metaphor even make sense? Tough call, but if nobody knows about something, then not a lot can get done.

There are tons of great high school fundraising ideas – candy, bake sales, barbecues (people are hungry), online donation pages, Facebook groups, and the list goes on. But the extra special ingredient in any high school fundraising campaign is…wait for it…no, not love. It’s PROMOTION! You can’t raise any funds if you don’t raise awareness. If people don’t know about you, how are they supposed to give you their money? (The other special ingredient in any fundraising campaign.)

Luckily promoting your school fundraiser is as easy as the pies you might possibly be selling. Local and online promotions can help spread the word fast so your school can finally get that gold-plated David Beckham monument for your soccer field.

A Parent Letter: First, send out a letter to parents outlining the goals, logistics and anything else regarding your high school’s fundraiser. Make it snazzy or make it bland, just fill them in! Families are essential in spreading the message across your community. You know how your parents seem to know every other adult there is until it dawns on you that they might be part of some secret cult in cell phone clips and pocketless jeans? Tap into that resource.

A Kick Off Rally: If your school’s fundraiser is running for multiple days, hold a ‘kick-off rally’ on the first day to gather volunteers and pump them up. They’re your troops! So rally them together by getting them excited and enthusiastic about the cause.

Daily Announcements: Hijack the morning announcements and pimp your cause to the whole school. Kids have short attention spans these days, what with their cellular telephones and MTV (get off my lawn!) – a daily reminder can’t hurt. After all, a high school fundraising campaign has a lot better chance with the whole school behind it.

Newsletters: Newsletters are great because they give you access to the secret world of promotional DOMINATION: online! With newsletters come email lists and a whole slew of potential donors that are connected to your cause. Be it your own school’s newsletter or the charity they’re affiliating with, get a story featured about your fundraiser and reach out to the people it connects you with.

And now that you’re online, stay there: Unless you’d rather NOT get the maximum amount of return for the smallest amount of effort. In which case, carry on baking cookies and going door-to-door.

Local offline fundraising efforts are great as part of an overall campaign and experiencing the blood, sweat and tears of raising money for a good cause (try not to get any of that on the cookies). But in order to reach the most people and create the biggest impact, online is where the money is. In terms of awareness alone, Facebook and Twitter allow to you to reach tons of people with just one click – not to mention their friends, and friends of friends, that they can share with. And considering every teenager (and their mom) on the planet has at least one social media account, it’s a booming resource for any high school fundraiser to take advantage of.

So while selling magazines or holding a bake sale as part of your high school fundraising campaign is all well and good, launching an online element where people can directly donate to your cause is a no-brainer. Because whether you’re trying to raise money for a Starbucks in your cafeteria or something a tad more meaningful, the operative word in fundraising is funds, and the easiest and most effective way to get them is through an online campaign. It offers high volume promotion and easy fundraising in one – which is a well-deserved reward for all that energy spent on poster hanging and kick off rallies.