4 Ways to Streamline Your School Fundraising Campaigns

As a teacher or school administrator, you likely face a variety of unique challenges from time-consuming administrative work to burnout to a lack of funding. However, an effective fundraising strategy combined with the right technology can help combat these challenges to give you the resources needed to educate and bond with students.

Whether you’re holding a read-a-thon to raise money for new textbooks or a fun run to collect funding for new P.E. equipment, these campaigns supply the revenue and resources you need to give students the best education possible.

In this guide, we’ll explore the ways you can optimize your school website, leverage technology, and mobilize your community to streamline and enhance your fundraising campaigns. Let’s get started!

Prepare with the right technology.

Fundraising technology is designed to automate, organize, and streamline the repetitive and time-consuming aspects of fundraising. However, not every fundraising platform is created equal. To ensure you have the capabilities you need, choose fundraising software designed with schools in mind.

Ideally, school fundraising technology should:

• Be free or low-cost
• Handle setup for you to save time
• Not require significant input or effort from parents
• Accept a variety of payment options, including cash, checks, credit and debit cards, ApplePay, GooglePay, and PayPal
• Offer easily-shareable campaign and individual donation pages
• Track fundraising progress
• Automate messages to donors, such as donation receipts and thank-you emails

Additionally, check that the solution can facilitate the types of fundraisers your school runs. For example, 99Pledges’ school fundraising tool specializes in pledge fundraising, a method that involves your students collecting pledged donations from their friends and families online.

Enhance your website.

Improving your school’s website makes the experience of giving better for your supporters. When it’s easy and convenient for them to engage at any time, from anywhere, they’ll be more likely to get on board with your fundraiser.

Making sitewide improvements not only boosts revenue, but it can also help your fundraising team. This step enables your team to centralize announcements and updates, accurately track fundraising data, and tailor communications with donors.

Some of the basic elements of a strong school website include:

• An emphasis on accessibility. Your website should be accessible to anyone who wants to support your school, regardless of ability. Make your interface accessible using a keyboard, enable screen readers, and ensure adequate contrast between text and background colors. If you’re unsure whether your website is accessible, browse the full set of web accessibility guidelines.
• Intuitive navigation. Once users arrive at your homepage, it should be easy for them to find and navigate to the page they’re looking for. Link to key pages like school information, staff details, and your calendar are in the top navigation bar. Additionally, consider adding a link to your fundraising page on your homepage or in this menu to drive visitors that way.
• Data tracking. Make sure your website has a way to track traffic, such as Google Analytics. This can tell you how many visitors your site has, which pages they navigate to, how long they stay on the site, and whether they convert (i.e., donate or take another desired action).
• Mobile responsiveness. You never know when supporters will choose to give—it could be while they’re in line at the grocery store or attending soccer practice. To capture the most donations, your website and donation form should be accessible from any device. This makes on-the-go giving possible, helping you secure more funding.
• Search engine optimization. SEO involves strategically enhancing your website's content to improve its ranking in search engine results. This can be achieved by creating valuable, relevant content that incorporates keywords related to your school, such as "Your Town Elementary spring fundraiser." In addition to content optimization, there are straightforward SEO tactics that can significantly boost your website's rankings without requiring advanced technical skills. However, it is also crucial to monitor and maintain the technical health of your website, as Google's ability to accurately interpret and rank your site is heavily influenced by technical SEO. By focusing on both content and technical aspects of SEO, you can increase your website's visibility on search engines and drive more traffic to your fundraising pages.

When designing your fundraising or donation pages, take inspiration from top nonprofit websites. These nonprofit websites tend to focus on providing simple, straightforward donation pages, centering valuable content, and making the site and its top pages easy to find.

Simplify event management.

Fundraising events are a great way to draw in more supporters for your school’s fundraisers. As Double the Donation explains, 81% of American donors attend fundraising events, meaning they could attract significant support for your school.

However, we know you might be thinking about the downsides of hosting an event—the time, expense, and manpower needed to organize and execute it. This is where the right technology comes into play. Here’s how to streamline each aspect of your school’s fundraising event management:

• Registration: Provide short, user-friendly registration forms supporters can access from any device. Share automated emails to confirm registration and issue reminders right before the event to boost attendance.
• Marketing: Choose an email marketing platform to seamlessly create and launch a campaign to promote your event. Ideally, the platform should allow you to create custom email lists and segments for targeted messages.
• Event logistics: Depending on the size of your event, you may need additional tools to manage volunteers, vendors, budget, and event-related tasks. Shop around for these tools or create documents and spreadsheets to keep everything organized.
• Check-in: To reduce lines and wait times, consider setting up a digital check-in process (e.g., have volunteers scan tickets using phones or digital devices). Compared to using paper lists, this method will be much easier and faster for staff and attendees.
• Follow-up: Similar to registration, you’ll need to send mass communications to attendees after the event. Make sure you have fundraising or marketing software that can automatically share thank-you messages, feedback surveys, and even updates on your fundraising progress.

Because events can be a larger expense for your school, look for ways to offset the costs. For example, you might seek out corporate sponsorships to secure financial gifts or in-kind donations of goods and services. Or, spread awareness of corporate giving initiatives like matching gifts to help donors’ contributions go further.

Recruit and steward volunteers.

In addition to using event management tools, your school will also need helping hands to assist during the actual event. For example, you’ll need help decorating the space, checking in attendees, supervising activities, standing by to assist participants, distributing food, cleaning up, and more. Having more help will reduce the workload for everyone involved, making it faster and easier to organize engaging school events.

Start by recruiting from your existing pool of supporters. Rally your PTA and reach out to past donors to see if they’d be willing to volunteer at your event. You can also recruit from your community and students’ extended families by marketing open volunteer roles on your website and social media.

To steward these relationships and encourage volunteers to return in the future, be sure to thank them once the event is over. Share a heartfelt message that elaborates on the individual impact of their support and what it means for your students.

The Gist

Fundraising doesn’t have to be a drain on your school’s time, energy, and resources. Instead, leverage technology that is a perfect fit for your needs to streamline the fundraising process, from planning to collecting donations to following up with donors. This way, you won’t just be able to balance fundraising with your busy schedule—you’ll build a dedicated community that’s always looking for the next chance to support you.