Principal stunts and antics. (Also, known as principal torture or punishment!) 

If you are willing to take one for the team, there is no better way to get your students’ attention, create buzz, and motivate fundraising. Some stunts and antics to consider are the customary pie-in-the-face, shaving a beard/mustache, or worse, your whole head. The greater the embarrassment the more can be raised. Just remember you still have to lead the school the day after!

Grade-level fundraising incentives. 

You can maximize participation by setting up grade-level competitions. Award prizes to grades with the highest number of fundraiser participants and/or the most money raised. If your school or school system is a LeanStream customer, we make it easy to track and promote these competitive activities through either a Standard or Feature Need Posting. All you need to do is turn on Track Units. You can even set up individual goals by grade to consider grade size differences and keep the competition equitable.

Award classroom-level fundraising incentives. 

It may be an even better idea to go beyond grade-level and offer classroom-level incentives. For an extra boost make sure to establish incentives for both students and teachers. Including teachers makes for a powerful teacher-student combination that can quickly boost fundraiser promotion.

Incentivizing your teachers can be as easy as establishing an annual trophy that goes to the teacher’s classroom for either raising the most money and/or having the highest number of participating students. Another approach would be to enter each teacher in a drawing for helping out or enter them once their class achieves a set goal. LeanStream users will have real-time fundraising performance data at their fingertips and can easily build up some healthy, fun competition by providing a daily update on which classrooms are the top three performing during daily student announcements.

Such acts will make a substantial, positive impact on your school fundraising results at low-to-no additional cost.

Student/family fundraising incentives. 

Give every student or family at least one small gift and recognize them for their participation in the school fundraisers. This will help boost your school fundraiser outcomes and further strengthen your entire school community.

If you want to create buzz and speed up participation, distribute student prizes in the form of homework passes, “wear a hat for the day” passes, keychains, stickers, or other low-to-no cost items. This will encourage other students who are not yet engaged in school fundraising to participate.

Keeping track of who participated, and the number of contributions made, or the total amount raised by students can be tedious but it doesn’t have to be. Also, it is important to provide real-time notification of how students are doing to keep them energized and that can be time-consuming as well. However, if you are using LeanStream, the simple solution is to have donors make donations in the name of the students that they are supporting. This will allow for real-time reporting of both how many donations are made and how much money has been raised by each student.