Frugal fundraising for schools

How can frugal families and individuals participate in fundraising for schools and other nonprofits? Even if regular giving or tithing isn't part of your budget, you can still make sure a few dollars of your money trickles back to the organizations you care about. In this post, I'll focus on fundraising for schools.

I love my son's childcare center. But all their fundraising campaigns are too expensive for me to partipate in. I've donated my time to a few of them, but I get tired of feeling pressured to get out my checkbook all the time when I'm already stretching myself thin paying tuition. Pay $50 per person to attend our auction! Come to this spaghetti dinner, where the "suggested donation" is as much as a restaurant meal! Buy frozen cookie dough--$5 for enough dough for 5 cookies! Buy super-fancy wrapping paper--only $10 per roll!

I knew that if we felt excluded by the fundraising that was going on, other families must also be feeling the pinch (and the pressure). I decided to see what I could do about it. I've been investigating low-cost fundraising opportunities for schools that allow everyone to participate. For me, the point was not to raise significant amounts of money. Rather, the point was to make sure that everyone in the school, even the ones with subsidized tuition, can feel like they're helping to pay for the programs and the high-quality teaching staff that make the school so great. The director and the board are happy to let me fundraise my little heart out, as long as my efforts don't take away from the big-ticket fundraising they spend their energy on.

Here are a few programs and ideas for frugal fundraising.

1. General Mills' Box Tops for Education is unfortunately only available to K-8 schools, so my son's childcare center isn't eligible. But we buy Cheerios (in my house, the boys' palates are too refined for the generic kind) so we clip the box tops and give them to a friend whose kids go to a co-op K-12 school that participates in the program.

2. Campbell's Labels for Education, although they don't have the K-8 limitation, are not real attractive because you have to collect literally thousands of labels before you can redeem anything. When you do manage to collect enough, your school gets supplies, not cash. But supplies are good, and it doesn't cost anything to join, so we're participating. When I tried to sign the school up, I found out that three directors ago somebody registered the school for the program. After jumping through some hoops, I got our access code and renamed myself as the program coordinator. A few signs up around school, a notice in the newsletter, a box decorated by the toddler class to hold the UPCs, and the Labels for Education are starting to pile up.

3. Schoolpop is another garden variety click-through rewards site, except that instead of getting a check for your efforts, the rewards go to the participating school of your choice. I'm way too selfish to give up my Upromise and Fatwallet and Ebates kickbacks, so I didn't pursue it for my son's school. If he's there through pre-K (at least 2 years away) I may get around to signing the school up for this program.

4. Acme grocery stores (and perhaps other stores in the Albertsons family) have a program that allows you to save BLUE register tapes only (not the white ones, don't know why). When you've saved up five grand worth of receipts, you can send them in and Acme will send your school a check for 1% of the total. That's $50 per $5000. I've signed the school up for this program and so far have collected $4207.79 worth of receipts in just a couple of months. We're almost there!

5. What about good old fashioned bake sales? At our last childcare center, each month of the year one of the classrooms held a bake sale. The classroom's parents were responsible for organizing the sale, baking or buying treats to sell, and staffing the table. It was a lot of effort, and the gross proceeds usually hovered just under $100. But the money went to subsidize the school's excellent music program. For a quarter you could get a cookie and feel like you were making a contribution to your child's education.

6. Plant sales! Every year I buy a few herbs from a friend who is selling them on behalf of her daughter's school. I have also bought bulbs. The prices on the plants are about what you would pay in a store, and the quality is excellent. My son's school already sells bulbs in the fall and plants in the spring. On occasion, I've saved my money by not buying anything, but helped out tallying up all the school's orders using Excel. If you really don't have any money to contribute, see if there's a way you could donate time.

Finally, a success story. I've been tallying up the Acme receipts brought in by teachers and parents. And I admit, I'm getting some voyeuristic pleasure out of seeing what other people buy, whether they use coupons, etc. I can't tell who the receipts came from, so privacy is protected. This week, I found in the box a bundle of receipts for groceries that were paid for with WIC vouchers. If a family is feeding themselves using WIC, I'd be willing to bet that they were not participating in the high-cost fundraising that was the only option before I started the grocery program. Now, that family's purchases are earning cash back for the school, and they can feel like they're contributing just like everyone else. That's worth all my time and effort, even if the school doesn't make any real money from these programs.