3 Inexpensive and Easy School Fundraiser Ideas

Experience can be your guidepost when gathering school fundraiser ideas. Schools, churches and other local groups are able to provide their unique perspective on the best way to go about planning your event. Relying on experience can help you avoid some of the pitfalls you might not see.

With this in mind, we move on to our first idea: raid the dollar store.

Bring a creative friend to the dollar store with you, get some makeup and you have the makings of a clown. Find a package of balloons and imagine them nailed to a board with enthusiastic kids throwing darts for points (and profit for your event). An entire mini carnival could be planned with a few trips to the local dollar store, if you have the imagination to see the potential.

Now we move on to our second idea: take donations.

Businesses, both local and chain, will often be willing to donate an item or items to your event. A few gift certificates to a chain restaurant or from a movie theater will grab the interest of lots of people. These can be used for a raffle, or as a door prize of your choosing. Larger, more tangible items may be used in an auction to benefit your event. Seeking the benevolence of a record store might yield you some music downloads. If a supermarket is willing to donate food, ask for cake mixes, muffin mixes and anything else you can make to provide a little more value than just a box of store bought cookies.

The last of our easy school fundraiser ideas is: go online

Most retail websites will partner with you to help you choose items to add to a web page, allowing you to run your event virtually and eliminating a lot of stress. Promotion through fliers and via email can generate a lot of excitement and encourage people to buy in the name of your cause.

To make this even easier, some sites will do the legwork for you and allow you to partner with them. In turn, they deal with the websites themselves, leaving you only to conduct business via email with one entity instead of many. With so much to do these days, it's certainly a nice option to have. Unless they have a lot of time they don't know what to do with, an online partnership is the direction many people choose to go.

To summarize, here are the 3 inexpensive and easy school fundraiser ideas:
Raid the Dollar Store
Take Donations
Go Online

For more information about online partnerships, please see my school fundraiser ideas blog. You may also find my school fundraiser ideas site useful. My name is Jim McClinsey and writing helpful articles is my passion.