Year after year, your school strives to provide top-notch learning experiences for its students. Between engaging classes, extracurricular activities, and field trips, you do plenty to promote personal and educational growth among your young scholars.
But you need reliable funding to continue doing all that you do. That's why online fundraising for schools is so important. Online school fundraisers are convenient, require fewer volunteers, and have a much larger reach than traditional in-person fundraising campaigns.
In this article, we'll discuss everything you need to know about school fundraising to help you rally your community and tap into more financial support. Here's what we'll cover:
Your school needs quick and easy fundraising ideas so you can stay focused on creating rewarding learning experiences for your students. With software such as Read-A-Thon's platform on your side, you can raise more with less effort. Let's jump into the basics you need to know to launch a successful online school fundraiser.
Before jumping into the most popular online fundraising ideas for schools, we'll walk through some frequently asked questions to set your team up for maximum success:
Online school fundraising is a popular choice among institutions of all types and sizes due to its numerous benefits, including:
Plus, when all of your school fundraising takes place online, you can better measure your engagement and progress. With this information, you can pivot your strategies or make immediate adjustments as needed to reach your fundraising goal.
Whether your school is new to online fundraising or looking to improve its current efforts, follow these simple steps to lay a strong foundation for your next campaign:
To choose the best online fundraising idea that fits your school's specific needs and budget, start with your fundraising goal. Assemble your team and ask yourselves the following questions:
Also, consider the impact that you're hoping to accomplish for your school and students. Use these details to guide you in selecting your ideal online school fundraiser.
Via email, text, and other communication channels, share duties and responsibilities with your fundraising team. To keep everyone on the same page, create a detailed guide to reference throughout your campaign. Some platforms, such as Read-A-Thon, come with an official admin guide that will walk you through the process of organizing and executing your fundraiser successfully.
Ultimately, your school's students and parents will be doing most of the actual fundraising or donating. Therefore, it's essential to get the word out. For instance, you can:
By using multiple channels to spread awareness of your upcoming online fundraiser, you can increase the chances that people hear about and decide to support your campaign! Read-A-Thon's platform makes multi-channel marketing for your school fundraiser easy by supporting text, email, and social sharing. Plus, we provide flyers you can send home to families and ad sponsorships for your school.
Start your online school fundraiser with a bang by preparing an engaging presentation. You might include an animated video, a slideshow, or even a guest speaker explaining your campaign. You can even assemble students in your auditorium for a pre-fundraising pep rally. However you convey your fundraising information, make it fun and easy to understand to maximize participation.
Throughout your online fundraiser, you should always have an idea of how it's performing. Track metrics such as your total donations raised and conversion rates for your online communications.
While your specific metrics will vary depending on the type of fundraiser you've selected and your goals, these fundamental data points will help you figure out how your campaign is doing and where you need to improve.
Read-A-Thons are a popular, reliable way for schools of all sizes to raise money. Plus, they have the added benefit of enriching your students' education at the same time. With Read-A-Thon's intuitive online platform, you can earn thousands of dollars simply by encouraging students to read.
To start meeting and exceeding your online school fundraising goals with Read-A-Thon, simply follow these basic steps:
Once your Read-A-Thon is up and running, all you have to do is encourage your students and watch as your fundraising revenue grows! Sponsors can donate using our secure credit card payment processing system and, when your campaign is complete, we'll mail your earnings directly to your school.
Typically, we recommend Read-A-Thons last two weeks to give your students enough time to participate and maintain momentum from start to finish. The whole process comes with no upfront costs, requires little volunteer commitment, and—depending on the model you choose—you'll keep 75%-80% of total donations earned.
80% of children agree that reading aloud is a special time with their parents and frequent readers report experiencing better mental health than infrequent readers. With this in mind, Read-A-Thons are a win-win-win for your school, students, and students' parents.
To learn more about the benefits of hosting a Read-A-Thon, check out our brief video overview:
As the video highlights, getting started with a Read-A-Thon is both fast and easy. It only takes five minutes to sign up and join 5,000+ schools that use Read-A-Thon to raise thousands every year. Howard Perrin Elementary and Sonoran Sky PTO are just two successful examples:
Plus, schools such as Prestwick Elementary and Westside Elementary noted the responsiveness of Read-A-Thon's support team in answering questions throughout their fundraisers. Whether you're preparing to celebrate Read Across America or simply looking to nurture a stronger love for reading among your students, Read-A-Thons can be an easy, game-changing addition to your school's fundraising strategy.
If you're looking for more tried-and-true fundraising ideas to inspire your planning, check out the following:
Speaking of educational fundraising, library fundraisers support a love of learning while bringing in critical funds for your school. Library fundraisers encourage students to collect online donations for their school or local libraries and, in turn, gain access to virtual books of their choice.
Your school will receive half of the donations, while the other half goes toward your students to reward their fundraising efforts. Schools can either use their donations to buy books for their libraries or receive the funds in cash. Students have the opportunity to make purchases through Love My Library's online reader store and choose from over 1,000 titles that will be shipped to your school at no cost.
Sign up for free to kick off a virtual fundraiser that students, sponsors, and community members will be inspired by!
Modern auction software has made it possible to make your next auction completely virtual and mobile-friendly!
Online auctions work much like regular auctions, except they exclude the cost of a venue, entertainment, and catering. Pick out high-value goods and experiences that participants would be excited to bid on, partner with a reliable auction software provider, and promote your event to parents and community members.
Branded merchandise such as water bottles, bracelets, and (of course) t-shirts are a great way for students and parents to show school spirit and raise money for your institution.
To begin selling your own custom merchandise, create an online store on your school website. Then, design and bulk order your gear from a custom t-shirt designer and advertise your products online and at other school events.
Matching gifts are a type of corporate philanthropy wherein companies match the donations their employees make to charitable causes. Many of these companies will match gifts for schools!
Take advantage of these readily available corporate gifts by sending out newsletters and alerts about corporate matching gift programs. You can even integrate a matching gift search tool into your online donation form to make it easier for donors to submit a matching gift request to their employers.
With this online tool, you can create a long-lasting, hands-free online fundraising initiative that multiplies the worth of every donation. Research even indicates that one in three donors would give a larger gift if they knew it would be matched!
Mobile giving is a simple and effective way to appeal to donors on the go and take advantage of the widespread use of mobile devices. After all, Americans spend an average of four and a half hours on their phones daily.
Instruct donors on how to participate through multiple marketing channels, including physical flyers and email blasts. This usually involves texting a special text keyword to a specific number. From there, they’ll either be prompted to text their gift amount or get directed to a mobile-friendly online donation page. With the help of a trusted text-to-give service, your donors will be able to give in a matter of seconds.
Who doesn't love a movie night? Turn this timeless event into a fresh and inventive online fundraising idea by hosting a virtual watch party on platforms like Facebook Watch Party or Teleparty. These streaming services do much of the heavy lifting, facilitating mass streaming for all attendees.
Engage participants by having them vote on what movie to watch, charge a virtual "admission fee" before sending out the link to your stream, and press play as donors enjoy a fun movie night from the comfort of their own homes. You could even sell popcorn and other snacks in the weeks before your event for participants to snack on during the movie night!
Crowdfunding leverages social media and online marketing tools to gather many small donations from a large audience of donors online. The idea behind this fundraiser is to cast as wide a net as possible and gain a lot of support in a short amount of time.
First, seek out a crowdfunding platform or use your own website. Then create your crowdfunding page. Set a specific goal, and on your website, explain why you want to reach your goal and how long you have to do so. Finally, encourage students, parents, and your supporters to share this page across the internet.
While this fundraising type can be a bit tricky and require some research, crowdfunding has the potential to generate massive amounts of revenue for your school!
Let your students, alumni, and community take charge of your online fundraising campaign with a peer-to-peer fundraiser! Reach out to your student body, faculty and staff, PTA members, and local community members to ask them to create donation pages in your school’s name. Then, direct them to fundraise on your school’s behalf by collecting gifts through their unique donation pages.
Thanks to social media, email, texting, and other online resources, your participants have a wide range of ways to reach out to their networks to raise funds on your school’s behalf. This means you might tap into donors you never would have reached before, thanks to the nature of peer-to-peer fundraisers.
From sip-and-paints for adults to arts and crafts nights for young students, virtual art classes are a simple way for you to engage various members of your community at little to no cost.
Simply select a teacher or guest host to guide your art night, list materials that your supporters will need in advance, and send out a virtual meeting link to participants in return for a small entrance fee. From there, customize and expand your virtual art classes to best suit your participants.
A shoe drive fundraiser provides an easy way for students, their families, and other community members to support your school without directly giving money. To get started, find a partner, like Funds2Orgs, that accepts gently worn, used, and new shoes and provides funding in exchange for them.
Then, encourage people to search their closets for shoes that they can donate. Place collection boxes around your community, such as at your school or even in individual classrooms. When your fundraiser ends, gather all the shoes together and mail them to your partner organization via a pre-paid bag. Once the partner has processed your collected shoes, they'll issue you a check based on the number of shoes you were able to gather.
This fundraiser is great for schools because students are constantly outgrowing their shoes. Plus, they help educate students about environmental sustainability by saving the shoes from landfills!
Product fundraisers can sometimes get a bad rap, but if your school is selling the right products, raising money online can be a breeze. After all, you’re not just asking community members to donate to your school but providing them with tangible goods in exchange for their contributions.
When hosting a product fundraiser, consider your audience and what types of items they’d want to buy. Cookie dough, popcorn, and cookies are all classic fundraisers, but some product fundraising partners get creative by offering candles, flowers, and even socks.
Many school product fundraising partners provide apps and online storefronts. This means your school just needs to get the word out on social media, while your partner takes care of the logistics.
Just because a school fundraiser takes place online doesn’t mean your students can’t get active! Like how Read-A-Thons are popular because they support good reading habits in students, walk-a-thons are popular because they support good exercise habits.
To run an online walk-a-thon, plan to conduct the walk-a-thon itself in person at your school, but provide students with all of the tools they need to collect pledges online ahead of time. Consider setting up individual pledge pages for each student so friends and family who support them can see how close they are to their fundraising goal and check back in after your event to officially submit their donation.
Your students are developing new skills and finding their passions, and some of them might be eager to show off with a talent show. Talent shows can also be hosted entirely online, if need be.
Have students sign up to perform, hold auditions to ensure all acts are appropriate, and then create a show schedule. Live stream the show to an online audience or host the entire event virtually by having students use free video conferencing tools like Zoom to broadcast their talents.
To raise funds, ask guests to buy tickets, whether they’re attending in person or online. Since your talent show is an event all about school pride, you might also use it as an opportunity to promote your merchandise store.
Allow community members to support your school without changing their daily routines at all. How? Through online shopping fundraisers.
These fundraisers generate passive revenue for your school throughout the year. Essentially, your school partners with an online shopping fundraising program that has connections with various major businesses. Then, ask community members to download your shopping fundraising program’s app or browser extension and make purchases through it.
When a supporter does buy something through your partner’s app or with their browser extension activated, your school will receive a percentage of the sale—at no extra cost to the buyer!
While this fundraiser raises money for your school in the background of other fundraisers, don’t treat it like a passive revenue stream. Instead, routinely market the program to encourage members of your community to join or continue shopping through your partner.
Successful online school fundraising doesn't have to be labor-intensive. There are plenty of platforms designed to streamline fundraising activities for your school. Let's take a look at some of the top options:
Read-A-Thon simplifies every step of your school fundraising process. When you sign up, you can immediately start encouraging your students to read and collect donations based on how many minutes they put in.
The Read-A-Thon platform's key features include:
Additionally, you can access a wealth of free resources to support your online school fundraising success, including kick-off videos, and printable reading logs. Read-A-Thon is free and easy to launch in minutes!
Love My Library is a cost-effective online fundraising solution that allows you to set up easy, engaging online or hybrid book fairs to generate revenue for your school and inspire your students to read.
By signing up, your school will be able to:
With no contracts, minimums, or need for volunteers, it's easy for your school to get started with Love My Library.
With Bonfire's t-shirt fundraising platform, your school can design custom t-shirts and raise funds by selling them to parents and other community members.
Some of the platform's main features are:
After your t-shirt fundraising campaign, Bonfire will handle printing and shipping the shirts to everyone who purchased one. Then, you'll take home 100% of the profits your school raised.
GoFundMe is an online crowdfunding platform that makes it easy for schools to reach a wide audience of supporters and meet a variety of fundraising goals.
Whether your school is looking to raise money to purchase new computers or expand your extracurricular offerings, the platform allows you to:
Unlike some other crowdfunding platforms, with GoFundMe, your school doesn't even need to hit its fundraising goal to access the funds you earned.
When you partner with Funds2Orgs, you can host a shoe drive fundraiser that generates revenue for your school and supports micro-entrepreneurs in developing countries.
The process of fundraising with Funds2Orgs looks like this:
While there are physical elements of this school fundraising idea, your students and other community members will be able to participate whenever is most convenient. All they need to do is check their closets for suitable shoes to contribute to your fundraiser!
Once your school has chosen its next online fundraising idea, it's time to lay the groundwork for success. Regardless of the type of campaign you launch, follow these tips to make the most of your efforts:
Remember that, at the end of the day, each online school fundraiser presents an opportunity to bring your school's community together and celebrate your shared commitment to student learning.
Many engaging online fundraisers, such as Read-A-Thons, can become repeat initiatives for your school. After your campaigns, take the time to evaluate your results. Consider the amount you've raised, the number of donors who contributed, your return on investment (ROI), and other relevant data points. Then, you can use these insights to identify ways to improve your approach the next time around, so each fundraiser is more successful than the last.
If you need a little more school fundraising inspiration, check out some of our top additional resources: