Event Fundraisers
Read-a-thon
A read-a-thon is the ideal fundraising idea for schools, particularly because the kids participating in the fundraiser get to spend their time reading and learning instead of selling the same old fundraising items every year over and over again.
Similar to a walk-a-thon, a read-a-thon can bring in lots of fundraising revenue without requiring parents to donate truckloads of their own money. Whether it is five or ten or twenty-eight, encourage or assign students a goal number of sponsors to support them in their fundraising efforts. You can give students a tracking sheet with a place for parent or teacher initials next to each spot for minutes or pages read. You also can give students incentives to read, such offering top three who read the most within the fundraiser fun prizes, depending on the age range.
A read-a-thon has the potential to bring in thousands of dollars for your school, and no matter how much money it raises, your students are still reading more than ever. It’s a win for the kids no matter what!
Art Auction
Perfect for grades K-8, an art auction is an exciting way to get your kids excited about art, and it has the potential to bring in substantial amount money for your school’s needs. During one month of the year in art class, have your school’s art teachers create a project for your students to create a masterpiece of their own to auction off during an event. There is also the opportunity for donations from local art-centered businesses… reach out to them!
An art auction is a low cost, high reward fundraising option for your school. Regardless of what amount of funding is brought in through this fundraiser, anything that fosters children’s’ creativity is going to produce a positive result.
Spelling Bee
A spelling bee fundraiser is similar to a read-a-thon in that students get sponsors, but instead of receiving money for how many minutes or pages are read, the fundraising comes from how many words are spelled correctly! Schools can have different categories for each grade to keep things fair, and there can even be an exhibition category for teachers.
Keep things fresh with different themed spelling bees, like music, history, sports, literature, or science. A spelling be is an event that is educational and fun, so why not use this idea to raise some money for your school?
No Uniform Day
If your school is a private school in which students wear uniforms, this fundraiser is for you!
Kids love wearing their own clothes to school, and by setting up a few no uniform days per year, you can fundraise while getting the kids excited about showing their own style! By requiring each student who wants to dress down to bring $1 to school, you are potentially fundraising a few hundred dollars each time you announce a no uniform day (depending on the size of your school).
Whether you have a no uniform day once a month or once a semester, this fundraiser is a simple one to organize and gets kids excited to come to school.
Hat Day
Hat day is such a simple fundraiser to put together, and it’s fun for students! Since hats generally aren’t allowed in schools, designate a day where students get to wear one for a small donation. Charge kids $1 for hat wearing privilege, and you’ll create an exciting day for the kids as well as bring in money for your school. Hat day is extremely easy to organize, and lets students express themselves and oftentimes represent their favorite sports teams. This type of fundraiser is usually the most successful with middle schoolers, but can appeal to high school students, as well. Give a dollar, wear a hat! It’s that easy.
Talent Show
A talent show is a great way to include kids from elementary school all the way up to high school involved in your fundraiser.
The first step is to create a flyer which includes the time, place, and cost to enter the talent show. Charging individuals or groups a reasonable amount of money to enter will generate more entries, and in turn you will be able to gain more revenue from more parents and guests who attend the talent show. Be sure to create different categories based on age if your school includes several age groups. A group for elementary school children, middle school children, and high schoolers usually covers it!
Talent show rehearsals are necessary in order to make sure time flows appropriately, so have your talent show committee set aside time each week leading up to the talent show for students to rehearse and to get all of the kinks smoothed out before all of the parents show up to watch their kids on stage.
At the talent show, we recommend having a brief intermission for snacks and refreshments. This will encourage parents to go to a concession stand in between acts, which allows for even more fundraising to take place at the show. Don’t forget to buy medals or trophies for the top three winners in each category. Something tangible to hold is even more motivation for kids to put in their best efforts.
A school talent show is fun for everyone involved, and has the potential to bring in a plethora of fundraising cash for your school. Why not try this fundraising idea out?
School Dance
A school dance fundraiser is an event that can bring in a bundle of money because, I mean, who doesn’t want to party?
Students love school dances, and if you charge $5 per ticket, you’re likely to bring in a lot of money for your school. Set up a booth at lunch for students to sell tickets for the two weeks prior to the dance, and then charge $7 at the door for the last minute stragglers.
School dances aren’t too expensive to host, as you can use your cafeteria or gym for free, and often teachers and parents are willing to volunteer to chaperone the event. By simply providing a big bowl of punch and renting some speakers (if your school doesn’t already have its own), you are able to provide an exciting, but also safe, event for your students, as well fundraise hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on how big your student body is. So, get your most music savvy teacher to put together a playlist for the night and get ready to bring in some serious funds for your school.
Bottle and Can Drive
This type of fundraiser is as old as the idea of fundraisers themselves, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work! Bottle and can drives can be held once a month or once a semester. Let the community know by posting fliers at local restaurants, putting an add in the paper, and by making announcements on local radio stations. People have to throw away their bottle and cans, and if they’re made aware of a bottle and can drive that can support their local school, often people are willing to take their bottles and cans to a dropoff.
Having multiple dropoff spots can be beneficial, as this will make it easier for people to participate (because they won’t have to drive as far to take their recyclables.
Make sure to ask your local recycling plant what the best way to drop off these products, whether it be in plastic bags or bins, and how they prefer for the items to be sorted.
The amount of cash your school could potentially receive for returning bottles and cans may seem small, but if you have enough people participate, this simple fundraiser could bring in hundreds of dollars that you would not have had otherwise. Plus, you are encouraging your students and community to participate in recycling. There are multiple benefits to this type of fundraiser, and the organization is easy as can be. Bottle and can drives have been around for so long for a reason. Try it out!
Seasonal Fundraisers
Chili Cook-Off
A chili cook-off is a perfect fall-time fundraising idea for schools. It gets parents and kids cooking together for a good cause, and there’s not much bonding better than that.
Attendees of the cook-off try different samples and vote on which ones they like the best, and then the top chefs get prizes! (you can also have parents choose judges within the community, if that’s the method you prefer.) Make the prizes creative; maybe the overall winner gets top of the line cooking supplies! The attendees pay $5 to $10 dollars each, and they get to try some awesome (and sometimes not so awesome) chilis!
Tip: have a batch or two of extra chili on hand just in case one of the contestants doesn’t show up or if you have more attendees that chili for any reason.
Haunted House
Another great fall-themed fundraiser! Make a haunted house out of your school’s gymnasium or cafeteria. A mixture of spooky and goofy is always a good combination, and the ratio here totally depends on the age-group of students who plan to attend. You could even have two separate sections, one for younger kids and one for high schoolers depending on how much space you have to work with. Have teachers work the haunted house in order to add some entertainment (and the students are sure to get a kick out of seeing their teachers dressed up!)
Charge $5 ahead of time and $7 at the door, then show your haunted house guests a scary (or silly) time!
Candygrams
Candygram fundraisers are so simple to do, and they are often very profitable. Kids have lots of fun sending candy to their friends, and because you are able to These types of fundraisers are typically the most effective if they are done around the winter holidays or Valentine’s day. Advertise with fliers and school announcements beginning one to two weeks prior to the actual Candygram event. Have students helping to run the fundraiser set up a booth in a common area such as the lunchroom.
Choose candy that is easy to buy in bulk. For an event held around the winter holidays, candy canes are a great idea. For Valentine’s Day, Hershey’s kisses are always fitting! Buy stock cards (and ribbons for attaching the cards) in bulk to the candy so that students can write notes to go along with their candygrams.
Set your price to a reasonable amount, just make sure high enough to make a profit on each piece of candy sold. And it’s as easy as that! Have a few students from the fundraising team deliver the candy on a designated day, maybe the last day of school before winter break or on Valentine’s Day.
A candygram is a creative way for students to get small gifts for one another, and it’s a low cost and easy to set-up fundraiser for any school to organize!
Pumpkin Sales
Students and their families are going to buy pumpkins for Halloween, so why not take advantage of this seasonal fundraising opportunity?
How do you get pumpkins? Start by calling a local pumpkin patch or farm and see if they are willing to sell pumpkins in bulk in order to give your school a good deal. Many local farms want to support their community, so finding one that will be willing to help out your school shouldn’t be too challenging.
Where do you sell the pumpkins? Your school’s parking lot is an easy answer for a the question of location. It’s free to you, and usually empty on the weekends (which is typically when you’ll do a pumpkin sale.)
You can either do a pumpkin sale on one weekend of the month, or you can do a sale for several weekends leading up to Halloween. It might even be beneficial to do a sale the night before Halloween, even if it’s on a weekday, because some students and their parents will wait until the last minute to get their pumpkins. Have a few teachers and parents who are willing to volunteer their time work the pumpkin sales. This, combined with the low cost of setting up the sale, will result in a very little money spent to bring in lots of fundraising revenue!
Fundraising Games
Penny Wars
Penny wars is one of the most fun fundraisers in the game. This type of fundraiser is great for many reasons, but one of the best being that setting it up is almost no cost to the school at all. How it works: each class/school year has a large glass jar. Each jar is clearly labeled and placed in a central location at your school. The goal for each class is to fill the jar up with as many pennies as possible over a week’s time.
THE TWIST- the goal here (and the part that’s going to raise the most money) is to sabotage the rival class jars. The students do this by putting coins and banknotes other than pennies in the jars. So 10 pennies would be cancelled out by a dime, 100 pennies would be cancelled out by a dollar, etc. The team with the best total, even if it is negative, is the winner! Note: it is not out of the ordinary for most or all of the jars to have negative scores.
Announce the winner at the end of the week– giving the winning class a prize such as a cake or desert as a prize is never a bad idea!
Bingo
Despite popular belief, bingo nights aren’t just for old folks homes. Bring a classic game to your school and money to your fundraising pockets with a good old-fashioned night of bingo. It’s a game that’s simple to understand, so the youngest students can take part, too.
Bingo is a simple event to set up, and parents are often willing to provide refreshments and snacks to get the party going. Offering small trinkets can be a great incentive to win for the younger kids, and edible treats or gift certificates can be ideal prizes for grades 5-8. You can charge 5$ to get into the event, or charge per game. Everyone loves bingo, so why not get your kids and parents involved in a night of fun that will produce a night of funds?
Check out this bingo card generator you can use for your bingo night!
Scratch Card Fundraisers
Scratch card fundraisers are one of the most simple ways to raise money for your school. Each student gets one scratch card with the potential to raise $100 on each. The cards have bubbles on them, and students find supporters who scratch off one or more of the bubbles off, with each bubble revealing how much they will donate. The bubbles range from 50 cents to a few dollars. Each supporter that scratches off is provided with a coupon sheet which the students are provided with when they received their scratch off card.
Even if students only get half of the card’s worth scratched off, the profit is great. With twenty students in a class raising fifty dollars each, each class could raise $1000!
Here is a scratch card fundraising kit!
Jellybean Count
Everyone’s heard of a jellybean count, and most people have participated in one at least once in their lives. There’s a reason so many schools (and businesses) have jellybean counts; because they WORK.
Have students pay $1 to guess how many jellybeans are in the jar, and at the end of a week of guessing, make an announcement over the schools intercom of the winner, which will be the person who guessed the number closest to the amount of jellybeans in the jar. The winner gets to keep the jar of jellybeans, and you have just raised money in a snap!
Product Fundraisers
School Calendar
A school calendar can be a huge fundraiser directed specifically towards parents and family members of students at your school. Calendars can include student artwork, class photos, and pictures of school events.
There are several options when it comes to how to create your calendar. You can keep the price low by using school equipment and volunteers, or you can spend a little extra and use a professional printing service.
Calendars make great Christmas presents, so selling them around that time is definitely a strategy you’ll want to consider. But remember, preparing for and creating calendars can take a bit of time, so plan ahead to make sure you have everything done well before you want to start selling them!
Engraved Bricks
Parents and students alike want to leave their mark on their school. Provide them this opportunity by selling spots on bricks that will be used in a walkway or a courtyard at your school! You can partner with a company to make sure your brick engravings are of high quality, and then place names and small blurbs about each donor/buyer on each brick!
This type of fundraiser brings a great opportunity to reach out to alumni, so make sure you are contacting them through email and direct mail (if you have this information.) Also, reach out specifically to students and parents of students who are about to graduate from your school. Fifth graders at elementary schools, eighth graders at middle schools, and seniors at high schools are the students who are more likely to be motivated to want to leave their mark, as they are moving onto the next steps in their lives in the coming months.
Here is an example of a company you can partner with for brick engravings at your school.
Book Sale
Whether you’re a student, parent, teacher, or administrator, you certainly have a book or two at home that has been gathering dust on the side-table or bookshelf for so long you can’t even remember the last time you picked it up. Those books can be more useful than being coasters. If you set up a used book sale one Friday afternoon, and all the books that have been laying around can turn into fundraising cash for your school. You can also sell books from local libraries or used book stores that have too much inventory and are willing to donate for a good cause.
Put drop boxes around your school or local businesses who are willing to participate. Announce the book drive with fliers, posters, and emails.
If you have leftover books that did not get sold at the book sale, you can always donate them to local charities, shelters, or even add the ones in good condition them to your school’s library.
Cookbook
Cookbook fundraisers are very common at schools, and they can be a lot of fun for parents. Almost every mom, dad, grandpa, and grandma has a family recipe, and many of them would love to share the recipe with other families of children that go to their child’s school.
School cookbooks often sell for more than twice their cost, so your school has the potential for a lot of fundraising revenue. Schools can either go the route of using their own printers and tools to make the cookbook, or they can use a cookbook making service to put together the recipes in a more professional manner.
By getting parents and family members involved through the asking for contributions of recipes, you are much more likely to get them to buy a copy of the book that they are included in. A cookbook fundraiser is similar to the chili cook-off fundraiser we listed before, except that the cookbooks last for years and families can have them as keepsakes from when their children were in school!
Check out one service schools can use to put their school cookbooks together.
Popcorn Sales
Everyone’s done the tired the cookie dough and lollipop fundraisers at their school, but popcorn, now that’s an idea. Popcorn can be enjoyed all year long, whether it’s hot or cold, at a sporting event or in your very own home. There are several different companies your school can partner with in order to buy gourmet popcorn in bulk so that you can provide tasty treats to your students and their families while also bringing in support for events, repairs, and equipment.
Selling something as delicious as popcorn isn’t difficult, and by organizing sales once a semester, you can bring in revenue for fall and spring.
Using companies like Crazy About Popcorn can help you get the most out of your popcorn fundraiser.
Car Decals
Car decals are not necessarily what you might think of as a typical fundraising product to sell, but they have the potential to bring in a lot of money for your school.
Students and parents alike want to represent their school, and an easy way to do this is by placing a decal on their car. You can create decals with the school name or school mascot, or you can get more specific and have different decals for sports teams and school clubs. This can especially be a relevant fundraiser at high schools, because students in 10th and 11th grade are just getting their driver’s licenses and first cars. These are the perfect customers for car decals!
By selling car decals that you can order in bulk, you can both promote school spirit and bring in some much needed funds for your school!
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