Choosing the Best PTA Fundraising Ideas

If your kids are in elementary school the odds are good they will participate in a PTA fundraising campaign at least one time every year. That’s just part of school life these days. In fact when people are asked the main reason their PTA exists they will say to raise money more often than any other answer.

What are the Best PTA Fundraisers?

While we would love to have a definitive answer to that question there simply is not a one size fit all option. What works for one group of parents might fail miserably for another.

Some groups might like selling products and opt for cookie dough fundraisers or candle fundraising while others have strong volunteer groups and choose annual carnivals instead.

We’d like to suggest you get our Free PTA Fundraising Catalog. It’s a great starting point for choosing the right path. The catalog gives you the basics on the major product fundraising categories. In other words it gives you a great starting point.

How Many Fundraisers Should We Hold a Year?

We are advocates for the theory that a couple of well run fundraisers is much better for a school than continual requests for money. There is little more annoying than having your child come home from school with a new plea for money every week. We hear more and more parents telling us they are sick and tired of the book sales, pizza nights, donation requests and catalogs then ever before.

Our suggest for teacher-parent groups is to plan a fall and a spring fundraiser. Limit it to two but put all of your effort in to those two. You can not limit the number of fundraisers without increasing the effort and planning that goes into those 2.

How Do We Make Our Fundraisers Successful?

What we’ve found time and time again is that organized, motivated PTA’s are successful where other’s fail. So we’ve come to the conclusion that it really doesn’t matter what product you sell or event you plan. If you don’t spend time planning, promoting and implementing your fundraiser it won’t matter.

We believe three things will insure your success:

1. Do everything possible to get maximum participation. Don’t worry as much about rewarding your top sellers. Make it imperative that everyone help. Create an environment where they want to help.

2. Create a communications center and assign someone specific responsibility for it. You want to be in constant contact with all of your students and parents before, during and after your fundraiser.

3. There are 2 parts to this. Set specific goals for everyone to reach. Families will live up or down to your expectations so give them reasonable goals to attain. But make sure they understand why you are raising money. Make sure the use of benefit of helping is clear to each student and family.

How Much Can I Make?

All conversations about PTA fundraising lead to this question. And unfortunately it’s a difficult question to answer. We’ve helped groups of students raise tens of thousands of dollars and they’ve done it with various products.

Instead of asking how much you can make the better starting point is identifying exactly what your needs are. We suggest you take your need number and pad it by 20% and set that as your fundraising goal. Once you know how much you are now trying to raise you can choose the best path to attain your goal.