min read
Many of us remember participating in a fundraising event when we were in school. You know the kind I’m talking about — the ones where you went out and sold 50 tubs of cookie dough in hopes that you’d finish in the top 3 sellers and win a giant stuffed monkey.
What we probably didn’t know at the time was how little of the money that our grandparents and neighbors forked over actually went to our school.
Spoiler alert: It’s usually less than 50%. We were basically working as a free child-labor sales force for Mrs. Fields or Little Caesars pizza. And on average, less than 50% of the money we raised ever went to our school.
So when these fundraisers advertise that the average client raises, say, $ 15,000 per campaign, they’re leaving out what percentage of the gross sales actually goes to the schools and what percentage goes to the fundraising company. They’re also not accounting for the value of the free work they’re getting from your community.
As an example, let’s say a school uses RaiseRight Scrip. In their fundraising model, people buy gift cards from big companies like Target and Amazon. These big companies, in turn, cede a percentage of the gift card profits to the fundraising organization. What percentage, you ask? 2.5 %. Effectively, Target is getting hundreds of hours of free sales work — the equivalent of a couple full-time employees — from a class of school kids selling gift cards to the community, and keeping 97.5 % of the money.
You read that right. Target and Amazon keep 97.5 % of the “fundraising” profits and the elementary school gets to keep only 2.5 %. It’s more of a corporate marketing scheme than a fundraising campaign for the school.
Community Funded flips this model. With us, K12 clients can keep over 90% of funds raised with either no upfront fee or a nominal upfront fee. And instead of relying on a sales team of nine year olds knocking on strangers’ doors — cute, but effective? — our powerful and customizable fundraising platform will make it easy for you to create engaging campaigns and drive givers to your cause.
Contact us today and learn more about how we can help you meet your fundraising goals.
About Community Funded Community Funded is a leading digital fundraising platform designed by and for the world’s greatest education, non-profit, and healthcare fundraising organizations. The Community Funded platform allows users to build their own fundraising campaigns or choose to utilize the highly specialized Community Funded Services team to execute all their marketing needs. With technology that seamlessly plugs into existing websites, payment gateways, analytic platforms, and workflows — organizations are able to easily grow their networks, acquire more donors, increase their online presence, and raise more.
