Fundraising Ideas?

[290Piika]

My band is suffering financial woes right now, and I'm sure we're not the only ones.

So I was wondering, does anyone have any fundraising ideas and tips they'd like to share? :]

[KUguardgrl13]

my high school band has a fruit & nut sale every spring that is pretty successful, i think. the orchestra sells poinsettias around christmas, and the choir has a pie sale. also, those gourmet lollipops that you sell for 50 cents each always do really well with students. also, concessions at football games and other sporting events bring in a lot of money, so if you could get parents or students to work one, that would bring in money too. i work a stand at KU basketball games as part of Tau Beta Sigma, and we give a large portion of our proceeds to the general band fund, and a small portion to fund ourselves as well. college concessions bring in a lot more than high school events, but it's still quite a bit. hope that helps

[bluescalesdragon]

The indoor colorguard at my school does the gourmet lollipop thing, too. It must be a band thing....

Anyways, if you're allowed to, try buying boxes of full size candy bars and giving them to kids in band to sell the individual candy bars for a dollar each....if there are 36 bars, you make 36 dollars minus the 16 dollars or so you used to buy the box...so there's a profit of about 20 dollars a box. Kit-Kats and interesting stuff like cookies and cream Hershey bars sell VERY well.

[290Piika]

I'd love to do the candy again. When I was in middle school, the choir sold those like crazy!

The problem is, we can't really sell to our peers on-campus because it's against some sort of nutrition law or some other nonsense (I'm not sure if it's connected to the California healthy food law or not, but it might be), and that used to be a GREAT way to earn money. Does anyone know how the good ol' car wash does?

I think we also have a bit of a communication gap between parents, directors, and students. We have fundraising going sometimes, but at other times, no one really seems to know... and a lot of students don't even seem to CARE. :[

[trumpetgeek]

Well since we can't sell candy either, we sell Smencil products. Smencils are pencils that have different smells, which sounds really weird, but they're pretty cool. They also have Smarkers (Which are pens/highlighters)

We sell them to raise money to go to Disneyland, but I dunno how well you'd do with them, it depends on what grade you're in. I'm in middle school, so they're a big hit with the 6th graders, but once they hit like 8th grade, they're not such big sellers.

Good luck, though!

[KUguardgrl13]

Mar 10, 2010 18:30:45 GMT -5 290Piika said:

I'd love to do the candy again. When I was in middle school, the choir sold those like crazy!

The problem is, we can't really sell to our peers on-campus because it's against some sort of nutrition law or some other nonsense (I'm not sure if it's connected to the California healthy food law or not, but it might be), and that used to be a GREAT way to earn money. Does anyone know how the good ol' car wash does?

I think we also have a bit of a communication gap between parents, directors, and students. We have fundraising going sometimes, but at other times, no one really seems to know... and a lot of students don't even seem to CARE. :[

yeah, minnesota has that issue too. i'd say go underground and sell out of your lockers, but since it's for a school sponsored activity, that's probably not a good idea i'd first work on fixing the communication issue and the "not caring" thing.

[290Piika]

So, I thought of an idea to recycle all the single-use water bottles we go through (which is a lot, both from the band and individually at practice or throughout a school day). I don't know how much it would get us, but considering how many people use water bottles and how many of those go to waste, I figure it's at least worth SOMETHING. When my family takes an SUV-load of bottles to the recycling area, we get like $20-ish back from recycling! :]

I also brought up an idea used often in the Jazz program, but is kind-of overlooked in the Band/Guard/Perc. program: program sponsorships (or sponsorships for our posters, too).

Anyone have any ideas that an entire community would be interested in? (Apparently our parents and staff are leaning away from the "product sales", since no one ever knows about them and thus no one ever fundraises through them.)

[altoclarinets]

Our main fundraisers are:
Carwash- getting one's car washed is free but we do "pledges" beforehand and also sell hotdogs and baked goods
Poinsettias- at Christmas
Cokes- throughout the year
Sustaining memberships- basically we solicit donations from local businesses/ parents and, depending on how much $ they donate, they get their name in the programs and several other goodies such as a certificate or plaque to put up in their office, etc.
Fruit and cookie dough are two old fashioned standbys that show up with a lot of band programs.