Best practice story for anyone trying to get school fundraisers going…
Took a little bit of a risky order for an entire school district in Seattle and created 15 school fundraisers that ran for the last two weeks. Each school used a 2 color unique print on three basic items (t-shirt, dryfit, hoodie). We offered a universal polo, jacket, sweats, and shorts that were available on each store. Each store had a pickup time and location that was provided by the district. We created custom checkout fields to take down students name and grade.
After we built the 15 stores, we created a landing page on our website where the school district pointed all their families to that had a link to each individual store (see photo). We set very strong expectations with the school district. They had to sell a minimum of 24 items per design, and would have to buy enough to hit those totals if a sale didn’t go well. We charged them an extra 2$ per item to Bag & Tag each customer’s order in a poly mailer from Uline (newly discovered profit enter). There would be no changes to orders or refunds once we processed them.
The district was more than thrilled with us because we were solution oriented and made everyone’s life easier. We took all the hassle out of collecting sizes, money, and distribution. They even decided to add a few dollars per item to fundraise.
We wanted to make sure this was marketed well so the school shared with me their mailing list and I created some basic emails that went out to parents via mailchimp.
The results were amazing. We sold a few thousand pieces and the districts made quite a bit of money along the way.
What I’m getting at here is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. They are probably an administrator in a school district and have much better things to do than figure out apparel. We took all the stress out of their position and handled the rest.
If you are scared of Amazon or any other threats in the industry, recognize that our digital economy is pushing the industry to be more convenience based. Think 2 day Amazon shipping, Starbucks, uber etc.
We have made strides to adapt our business to be more convenience based and it has paid off immensely! Price was never an issue here because everyone was winning. It ended up being an extremely profitable job!
I’d love to hear how this has worked for anyone, or any best practices.
