School Fundraising

David,

There are lots of things you can do "in-house" as it were to secure the funding you need without the expense or bother of a professional fundraiser in tow.

For example. Your school can take advantage of the various affiliate schemes that most laege companies offer, such as Tesco, Argos and Amazon etc. These companies will pay your school a handsome percentage of everything a customer spends when they buy via a link on the school's website.

There are companies who will do it all for you and charge a percentage of everything raised. In addition they may not always offer the best percentage rate. It's really simple to set up and run yourself, all it takes is about 10 mins.

Go to Commission Juction, [url]www.cj.com[/url] and open up an affiliate account in the schools name - it's free to do and only takes a couple of minutes. Then from their extensive list of client companies, place the banners or buttons of companies you want to partner on your website.

Then encourage parents, pupils, staff and supporters of the school to visit the school site if they are planning on a purchase etc and go to Amazon or whoever via a link on your site. They get their books or goods for the same price as if they had gone direct to the site, but this way the school gets a percentage of their spend. It's simple and it runs itself.

As a software developer I've been roped into my kids school to help set up something similar and Ive developed a browser toolbar, similar to google but better so that supporters don't have to visit the school website first. They can access a virtual mall from the toolbar.....this maximises the fundraising as it makes it really easy for the end-user to support the school in this way.

There are plenty of commercial companies who use similar methods as additional revenue schemes - AOL and Yahoo being two of the biggest. The UK shopping portal, CyberBritain.com uses this as their main revenue stream - I know because I wrote their browser toolbars
[url]www.cyberbritain.com[/url]

I have a beta version of the toolbar, which contains NO spyware etc which you can take a look at. It has "kid safe" searching of Google, Google Images and Answers.com. It also comes with a really easy intergrated RSS News Feed reader so the end user can receive the news headlines from where-ever they want.

[url]http://desknet.fileburst.com/stpeters.exe[/url] (1.3mb)
easily uninstalled from the toolbar itself

With around 5% of everything spent with just Amazon coming back to the school, the potential over the year can be quite staggering.

If you want any further advice on how we are approaching this at my kids school, youre welcome to email me robert@remlapsoftware.com

I hope this gets the creative juices flowing.

best wishes

have you considerd a gunging? i did one in a local school and over a week of fairly casual voteing we raised about 400 for the Make A Wish Foundation. it got in the local newspaper and everthing, its new fun and interesting.

[url]www.gunge-stuff.co.uk[/url]

Hi David

If you happen to be a church of england school, there may be fundraising help offered via the diocese board of education office (we certainly have this service here in Coventry). Even if you are not, it may be worth making an enquiry as they may have resources you can access or at least be able to point you in the right direction.

The local volunteer bureau/council for voluntary services may also be able to help you to access grants and funds, a few carefully-targeted applications to these may yield the funds you require, and the volunteer bureau will be able to help you refine your applications.

Good luck!
Charlotte

Dear David

Previuosly i was a fundraiser for an independent school in scotland, which had charitable status. This enabled me to access charitable trust grants. Charitable trusts can be researched using publications from the Directory of Social Change. I also had considerable success in securing funding from parents, ex parents, former pupils and local businesses. Our project was much larger than yours and raised over £600,000 in total. Apart from cash donations we ran Sportsman's Dinners, Golf Events, Ladies Lunches, Former Puil events, Art work sales etc etc. You need to get a group of committed parents and if possible successful FPs on a Development group to exchange ideas, exploit contacts and share tasks.
As far as employing a fundraiser is concerned it hardly seems worth it for a small project - why not look for a parent who is in sales or marketing, he/she will have the neccesary skills and will also have a committment to the school

good luck

Ken

[QUOTE=David Trent]

My questions are:

1) Do fundraisers ever work on a commision only basis, and would they get involved with a project like this? [/QUOTE]

Yes, a few do, but it is not the straightforward pay-only-on-results issue that you might think. The practice is deprecated by the UK's Institute of Fundraising and other national fundraising bodies. The issue has come up again and again on this Forum. Here's one recent example:

[url]http://www.fundraising.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=1210&highlight=commission+based+fundraising[/url]

[QUOTE]2) Is it worth employing a fundraiser to help with a project like this or could we do it ourselves?[/QUOTE]

A range of fundraising activities can be undertaken successfully by unpaid people with common sense, resources (people, time, and money), and some research into techniques/law/best practice etc.

[QUOTE]3) Is there a list of people who we could approach for grants towards a project like this?[/QUOTE]

Possibly, although not necessarily people - more likely organisations. The UK Fundraising Bookshop lists the various grant-making trust and other funder directories.

[QUOTE]4) Does this sound like a reasonable fundraising proposal? (obviously we would write a very detailed version)[/QUOTE]

Can't say. You'll need to demonstrate need, likely impact, support for the project, trustworthiness/reliability of implementors to stand a chance of securing funding.

[QUOTE]5) Would it be worth employing someone on a consultancy basis to draw up and implement a strategic business plan to ensure that the school had a regular supplementary budget coming in?[/QUOTE]

Unlikely given the relatively small amount of funding you are seeking. But others on this forum might disagree.

[QUOTE]6) Do you think that it would be possible to develop a regular, sustainable supplementary budget through fundraising?[/QUOTE]

That question is good: most schools/organisations seldom have one financial need, so a longer term programme of fundraising either for specific projects or for non-earmarked funding is probably a better use of your resources.

[QUOTE]I am sure that if we could get organised we would have a far higher earning potential.[/QUOTE]

I'd agree!

There are a number of educational fundraising specialists and fundraisers on this Forum - with any luck some of them will chip in with experience more detailed and relevant than mine. Good luck.