April 16, 2012
Parent Groups
National Playground Safety Week 2012 is April 23-27, 2012
National Playground Safety Week focuses on children’s outdoor play environments. www.playgroundsafety.org published some suggestions as below (read more):
Playgrounds don’t become safer all by themselves. They need people like you to take action! So what can you do? Here are some suggestions:
- Design and distribute surveys to discover favorite and least favorite equipment, as well as recurring playground problems and injuries.
- Send letters to your state governor encouraging them to proclaim National Playground Safety Week.
- Create and hang posters in schools and community areas outlining S.A.F.E. playground practices.
- Complete playground equipment safety checks and evaluations.
- Challenge your school to an injury-free week on the playground.
- Host a guest speaker to discuss safety on the playground.
- Check out your local playgrounds. If there is hard surfacing, such as asphalt, concrete, dirt, or grass underneath play equipment, call the owner and politely voice your concern. Ask if there is anything you can do to help with the transformation to safe surfacing.
- Write to the editor of your hometown newspaper commenting on any playground safety issues in your local community. Give credit to those facilities with safe playgrounds as well.
- With children, make a maximum of five playground rules that they can remember and follow.
“Play S.A.F.E.” Activities
If you are looking for an easy, self-guided, simple and effective way to raise money for any school project or other worthy cause, look on the internet.
There are web-based applications that make the whole fund raising process simple from beginning to end, with proven success! It simplifies the project by providing a readable form where by entering all the pertinent information, you can get the project started in minutes. Enter what school, group or organization you are collecting for, when you need the money, if you agree to handle donations through PayPal online collections and your dollar amount goal. You may leave the goal blank and just allow the system to collect as much money as possible, but past successes show that projects with a definite goal amount do best. It please people to see goal numbers being reached.
You can then promote your fundraising project on school, social media, personal or any applicable websites.
Many fundraising websites will process and track payments, and you will always be able to log in and see the progress at any given time. PayPal is the most effective and easiest way for contributors to donate money. Your dashboard account will give all the latest statistics.
These fundraising websites want to make fundraising simple. They are a fundraiser’s tool that is easy to manage. Usually fundraising campaigns can only be run for a maximum of one year. Most fundraising websites charge service fees, and the contributions handled by PayPal will be assessed PayPal fees. It is a secure and very visible way to get the most people involved.
You can find more infomration about Online School Fundraising Solution Comparison here.
There usually comes a time of the year when the school might need extra funds in order to carry on certain maintenance on the buildings, or perhaps renovate the school, add in more features, or simply to help misfortunate students. Schools had always been throwing fundraisers, even since way back then. So what are the current school fundraising trends today? Are the old methods still as effective as it was before? Here are some effective school fundraising ideas.
Car Wash:
The beauty about school fundraising events is that no matter what event, parents and the neighborhood are more than happy to support. One of the most popular school fundraising event is definitely doing a car wash. Who does not want a car wash for a cheap price? If possible, try to get the venue sponsored, and don’t forget to run good promotion, probably through local radio stations and putting up posters.
Fundraising Concerts:
Let’s face it, people are engrossed with music, and fundraising concerts are a great way to rake in money for your fundraising efforts. Try to contact any popular bands or artists who lives in your local area, and see if they could volunteer to sing a few songs as a guest at the fundraising concert. Of course, it could be difficult to have an all superstar lineup, so open the stage for any of the students who wants to perform. The star power from the guest performer could really help with your efforts.
Charity Sports Tournament:
They money that you get mostly comes from the joining fees of the teams or players, as well as the small fee you should charge the spectators. Don’t worry, people are more than willing to pay when they know it is for charity or for fundraising, so be clear about it.
School Fundraising Website:
Perhaps one of the most trendiest and “in” method of fundraising for schools is having a school fundraising website. This is the most cost and time efficient method, and definitely suits the modern times where we all know most people spend their times on the internet. With the help of social media integration along with the power of word of mouth, your school fundraising efforts are boosted. Check out our all-in-one school fundraising website solution can offer here to raise more money for your school.
However it is up to your school as to how you want to raise money effectively. It is best to consider certain factors like time, budget and surroundings when thinking of running a fundraising campaign.
April 11, 2012
Parent Groups
PTO Today is having a special event for all K-8 parent groups: enter for “2012 Parent Group of the Year” by May 31, 2012. Whether you’re a PTO, PTA, HSA, PTC, etc., you could win cash and prizes for your school.
Check out some helpful hints to win here.
This year’s Prizes:
Grand prize for the National Parent Group of the Year: $3,000
Prizes for category winners: $500 each
Last year’s winners were:
National Parent Group of the Year:
Oak Park Elementary PTO, Titusville, Fla.
National Parent Group of the Year Runner-up:
Pittsburgh Phillips PTO, Pittsburgh
Outstanding Parent Group at a Small School:
Gypsy School PTA, Depew, Okla.
Outstanding Parent Group at a Private or Parochial School:
Saint Ann’s Academy HSA, Washington, D.C.
Outstanding New Group:
Imagine Schools-Nau Campus PTO, Port St. Lucie, Fla.
Runner-up: Pinemount Elementary PTO, Lake City, Fla.
Outstanding Family Event:
Waccamaw Intermediate School PTO, Pawleys Island, S.C.
Outstanding Job on a Completed Major Project:
East Auburn Community School PTO, Auburn, Maine
Runner-up: Village of Barboursville Elementary School PTO, Barboursville, W.Va.
Outstanding Effort To Overcome Adversity:
Holy Trinity Episcopal School TVA/PLG, Houston
Outstanding Outreach to a Multicultural Parent Base:
Odyssey Charter School PTO, Newnan, Ga.
Outstanding Community Service Project:
Francis DeMasi Middle School PTA, Marlton, NJ
Quite often when it comes to traditional forms of school fundraising the approach is very word of mouth and done in a local setting. With the increasing popularity of websites such as kickstarter, there are a vast amount of charities that are taking a social networking approach to their charity and fundraising. Here are some of the advantages to using the internet and a social networking platform to fund your school fundraiser.
You can reach any audience anywhere: Because over 30 Billion dollars are donated year round for perspective grade schools, it is important to have your name and your cause out there. Quite often because the world has become such a global market, people will end up moving quite far away from where they grew up. In order to reach someone who may have an existing affinity for your institution or had grown up there, it may require reaching out on a social networking platform worldwide, but in doing so you gain access to many possible donations that would not exist locally.
You can fundraise at any time without being invasive: Quite often school fundraisers use tactics which include door to door and telephone sales, If something as simple as a link is forwarded around people are able to access the website at their leisure, at any time of the day. No longer will school fundraising be imposing and interrupt meal times and other events, not to mention your children/representatives for you fundraiser will no longer have to take time out of their busy schedules in order to properly spread the word about their school fundraiser, all of the information will be up on a convenient webpage.
It is easy to update: A webpage can be changed quite quickly, where a large scale fundraiser like a bake sale or a door to door campaign may take planning and volunteers, events, prizes and updates can be made on webpage at the earliest convenience with minimal planning and achieve great fundraising results if the page is closely followed by many users.
It can go viral: Just the same as if someone posts an interesting link on facebook or twitter, there is a chance that if your cause is truly great, that it will spread. A spread of your page or having it go “viral” will have many users suddenly donating to your cause, which can mean that you will potentially reach your fundraising goal much faster than traditional word of mouth. It is amazing what an online community can accomplish in a short time now especially if a page is promoted well and exposed to a large audience. An example would be the charity invisible children fund which was able to raise millions of dollars simply by using social networking for marketing and having an online donation page.
As you can see from these examples using an online fundraising page can really help to get your cause the proper recognition and funding much faster than traditional funding methods. It can be much easier to organise and potentially have a wider market, which can only prove greater results in raising money for your school.
Welcome to School Fundraising Website dot com! We have great news for school fundraisers coming soon. Stay tuned!
