If you’re looking for a school fundraiser you might consider narrowing your search down and look into holding a school candle fundraiser.

Candles make so much sense. Pardon the pun. But they really do. Research shows that just about every house in the United States burns or at least owns candles. Doesn’t it make sense that your school would want to sell a product with that broad of a customer base?

There’s lots to love about candle fundraising, the least of which is that it doesn’t cost anything to start one. That might not matter to a PTA or a school doing a school wide fundraiser where a company will give them credit. It does mean a lot for clubs, smaller organizations and sports teams. The complaint we hear about thinks like candy fundraisers is that the groups don’t have the money to buy a product in the first place or they might not even try to raise money.

Click here for information on the candle fundraisers we recommend.

Let’s spend a few minutes reviewing how a school candle fundraiser would work:

You first identify the candle line you want to sell. We offer 3 different programs including our Earth Candle Fundraiser, our Quote Candle fundraiser and our Journey of Faith candle fundraiser.

Next determine how many students will actually sell and order each of them a brochure and package of marketing materials. Send those home with the students and get them to take orders from friends and family. If the students try there is no reason each can’t sell 10 or more candles.

At the end of your candle sale gather all of the order forms together and tally the orders by candle type or scent. You should have instructed your students to collect payment when they took their orders so you want to tally the money together and deposit any checks in the school checking account.

Then you simply place a bulk candle order.When your order arrives divide out the candles and send the students home to distribute the candles they sold.

You’ll make 50% profit on all 3 of our candle fundraisers. Most of the candles sell for $12 so you’ll make $6 profit on each candle sold.

Remember there’s no cost to start so it might be the right fundraiser for your school to consider. Click here for more candle fundraising information.

We were a little stunned when we saw an article that was posted on the Drudge Report. The story comes from the Boston Herald and it talks about how state regulations would negatively impact school fundraising efforts .. especially cookie dough fundraisers and bake sales.

The articles starts with:

The Departments of Public Health and Education contend clearing tables of even whole milk and white bread is necessary to combat an obesity epidemic affecting a third of the state’s 1.5 million students. But parents argue crudites won’t cut it when the bills come due on athletic equipment and band trips.

And that’s where the uproar begins. Parents complain that the state is dictating what their kids can eat and they apparently don’t like it one bit. It appears like the people most irritated are those that sell food for fundraisers.

“If you want to make a quick $250, you hold a bake sale,” said Sandy Malec, vice president of the Horace Mann Elementary School PTO in Newtonville.

Maura Dawley of Scituate said the candy bars her 15-year-old son brought to school to help pay for a youth group trip to Guatemala “sold like wildfire.” She worries the ban “would seriously affect the bottom line of the PTOs. “The goal is to raise money,” Dawley said. “You’re going to be able to sell pizza. You’re not going to get that selling apples and bananas. It’s silly.”

Food fundraisers have helped send the renowned Danvers High School Falcon Band to the Rose Bowl Parade in California and the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu. Danvers Parents for Music Education sell fudge because “it still works,” said the group’s president, Matthew Desmond. “Even my wife will buy it.”

If you do not want your state or local government dictating what you and your family can eat and in turn determining what products you can and can’t sell to raise a little money you might want to be proactive and start talking to your representatives now. Because if you didn’t think this could happen to you this article might be an eye opener.

In our opinion there is a place and function for government but more and more often policy can get to the point where it appears and feels intrusive and has more far reaching effects that anticipated.

CLICK HERE for details on the top cookie dough fundraisers.

Does your group sell fundraising discount cards to raise money? I am curious to find out how you are doing with the sale of cards? The fundraising companies we speak to tell us that discount card fundraisers are booming. But then we ran across an article in the Tyler Texas newspaper that made us pause.

I’d like to share a little bit of the article and then get some feedback from our loyal readers about whether discount cards are still a good fundraising idea. Are Discount Fundraising Card Sales worth the work necessary to hold this type of fundraiser?

Here’s some snippets from the Tyler Paper:

“After eight years of discount card sales, Tyler elementary school students will take a break this year. The cards provided people with discounts at more than 20 Tyler area locations and served as a fundraiser for the participating schools and the Tyler ISD Foundation. Participating vendors included restaurants, entertainment and service companies such as oil changes, hair salons/barbers and dry cleaners, among other locations.”

Although we have not seen the actual card they used the discounts sound typical for fundraising discount cards and the inclusion of 20 merchants was a greater selection than most discount cards. So it would seem that the cards offered value. But apparently the buyers in Tyler didn’t think so.

“The TISD Foundation has led the campaign, but decided to suspend it this year because of poor sales last year and other priorities at the elementary schools. The way the program worked is that an outside company contacted vendors to include their discounts as part of the cards. Students and parents sold the cards and the school earned one-fourth of the profits, the foundation earned one-fourth of the profits and the company earned half of the profits.”

We are not familiar with any companies that operate with a profit split so we don’t know if the motivation for sales was not as high with this profit model. Most large discount card fundraising groups make 90% profit selling cards. Based on the article it looks like this group only made 50%.

“TISD Foundation executive director Larry Goddard said last year’s sales earned the foundation $10,000, half the profits of the previous year. Another $10,000 was spread among the participating elementary schools. “For the amount of time put into it by parents and teachers and students, it wasn’t worth it,” Goddard said. He also said elementary school parents, students and teachers have a lot on their plates this year with the new state assessments. “The elementary campus principals told us that they would do the discount card sales to help the foundation,” Goddard said in a statement. “We were impressed with the generous, dedicated benevolent spirit of our elementary principals — they do everything so well — but we want to change the vendor company and make it so that the card sales provide more dollars to the campuses for their discretionary spending.” He said the foundation is investigating other companies so that it can offer the cards and possibly additional fundraising opportunities next school year.”

The way we read the end of the article it appears like there was at least $20,000 of profits to be split. Most schools would love to have that kind of fundraiser. But Mr. Goddard indicates that there is too much work involved relative to the amount of money they raised.

So we would love to hear from you. Are discount card fundraisers still working for your group? Is the amount of time needed too much? Will you continue to sell cards?

There is obviously a need for school fundraising. There is no doubt about that. School budgets are being slashed more quickly than I ever remember.

Some towns and school districts have really identified that growing need for outside fundraising sources and are acting on those needs. I found this recent news article from the Milford Daily News:

“...“It’s not OK to use your language as an excuse. Show up. We’re going to have people here to support you,” he said. “At the end of the day, I’m going to hold those parents accountable.” Tremblay also said he wants to build off his Milford experience by forging new relationships between Framingham schools and local businesses and colleges.

He raised the idea of creating a fundraising board, for instance, to find funding opportunities in the area. He said one of his first moves in the district would be to get staff at all of the schools on the same page. “The one thing I’ve taken away (from yesterday’s visit) is the need to have everybody connecting across grade levels, vertically and horizontally,” he said. Tremblay would also get staff and residents’ ideas on budget priorities, he said. Asked about what he would do with Framingham’s School Choice program, Tremblay said he would look at the program before making a call and that, in general, he should avoid making hasty decisions on longstanding traditions in the district…”

It will be interesting as time passes and the need for school fundraisers becomes more and more pronouced how other towns and school districts will deal with those needs. Whether these initiatives are driven by politicians, school boards, school staff or parents, the one thing that is certain is towns and cities that aggressively meet their needs head on with strong plans of actions will be much better off than those that do not.

There was a time that Candy School Fundraisers were the most common way to raise money. But that’s changed over the past few years. There’s a few reasons why it is not as common. Some are valid and some not so much.

The biggest reason there’s been a reduction in candy school fundraisers has been school districts that determined youth obesity was caused in part because kids were eating too much candy. Part of their solution was to ban one of the easiest ways to raise money. After all candy fundraising offers products that are extremely affordable and well received. And even though only a small portion of candy sold during the fundraiser was actually consumed by the students many districts felt compelled to appear to be taking action.

Another reason that candy school fundraisers started shrinking was that the candy bars being sold were also shrinking. At first it was rather startling. Hershey fundraising candy was offering bars that were sold more inexpensively in vending machines. That is no longer the case. Hershey got smart and created a larger candy bar for their fundraising products line and it corrected the dilemna of discount stores selling candy cheaper than the school could purchase candy for.

Finally lots of schools chose to avoid candy fundraisers because they had to commit to a certain amount of candy. Pricing was based on the number of cases a school purchased so the tendency sometimes was to overbuy. The mistake was not intentional. It was just hard to accurately predict sales. And if you got a better price for buying a few more cases many people tended to error on the high side. But that meant that there was unsold candy which would seriously eat into profits.

Interestingly, though, now that there are few candy school fundraisers being held it might make more sense now to hold one. After all there is not the competition there once was and the fact of the matter is that most people eat candy bars now and then.