3 Fab Fundraising Ideas For This Upcoming School Year

School fundraising events not only garner funds to improve their facilities and equipment, but they also provide leadership and bonding activities for the children involved. About 73% of sales at a school fundraiser are earned by elementary school parents, students, and volunteers. A collaborative process like this is important for children to experience at a young age to understand how to work on a team. When you walk into the first PTA meeting of the school year with unique fundraising ideas, you’ll start your child’s lifelong learning of how a group effort can accomplish a common goal.

Dress Up The Teacher

This fundraiser has the goal of creating fun for the students and for a chosen teacher or staff member. You can organize a raffle that has a set monetary goal. Students, parents, teachers, and community members can donate towards reaching this goal. Once the school reaches the goal, the staff member willing to dress up — this person could be anyone at the school, including a popular teacher, the principle, or a favorite librarian — will have to dress up as a character that the students vote on. Give the kids a list of popular, appropriate characters to vote on, and have the chosen staff member walk around all day and take pictures in their costume.

Pet Beauty Pageant

Kids love to talk about their pets and they love to dress them up in crazy outfits even more. Organize a beauty pageant for the pets of students, teachers, and community members. You’ll raise money by having them pay a small sum to sign up their pets. Create different categories that they can compete in, including Best Dressed, Best Fur Style, Collar With The Most Bling, Funniest Outfit, and so on. Make prizes for each category, for both the pet and their human. If an in-person pet pageant seems unmanageable, have contestants submit photos and display them in a slideshow at the pageant. Encourage the kids to be kind when dressing up their pets, and warn parents against dyes with harmful chemicals.

Read-A-Thon

A favorite of teachers and parents, a school-wide Read-A-Thon encourages students to read for pleasure while raising money. Similar to how you would collect pledges when running a marathon, have students ask their parents, family members, and teachers for pledges on the number of pages or books they can read in a set amount of days or weeks. The students will log the hours and, if you want to ensure that they are logging honestly, have them write a short summary of what they read. You could ask the school or certain teachers if they’ll make time in the school day for the students to read specifically for the Read-A-Thon.

This school year, have a hand in making school fundraisers enjoyable for both students and parents and help the school raise money so that your child can have an amazing school year.