Wow! Thank you sooo much! That is precisely what I was looking for!
I am very interested in doing Scrip but if it can't be done right then I'd rather not do it at all, and there will already be so many demands on my time this coming year that I suspect I won't have the time needed to do it right. Maybe if we are able to bring parents back into the PTA (our primary goal this year) then someone else can take over the Fundraising Chair and I can start a Scrip program then.
Seems like such a waste to let all those dollars go though, especially when our school budgets are being slashed yet again...
I've covered scrip quite a bit in the past. I can try and provide a quick, objective compare & contrast of the traditional (great lakes) scrip model and what simplified scrip is doing.
One big caveat: I haven't worked at all with Simplified Scrip and -- with this type of fundraising's track record -- reliability and stability is worth quite a bit.
That said, it seems the fundamental difference between the two is that with traditional scrip your group bundles orders (therefore larger volume per order) and the shipping is just to one place (lower shipping costs and your group has more distribution work). With simplified scrip, individuals order direct and get certificates shipped direct.
At first glance, I was expecting the Simplified Scrip shiiping fees to be the real gotcha. But simplified scrips' shiiping costs actually appear low. But nothing in life is free, so i kept looking.
It appears -- if you do a quick apples-apples comparison of the discount rate/fundraising earnings on the same retailer at both scrip companies -- that the higher shipping costs (that just have to be a part of the simplified scrip model) are resulting in lower fundraising earnings per retailer.
Example: Macy's at SS = 5% earnings. Macy's at GL = 9% earnings.
That's not necessarily a good or bad thing, but I knew those shipping costs had to be in there somewhere.
So it seems there are a couple of key comparison factors:
1. Stability and reliability and track record.
2. Which model works better for your group? Parents order on their own and your group does less work and makes less $$ per $ ordered. Or group orders in bulk, does more work, and makes more $$ per $ ordered.
My only other observation is that i suspect that the individual-must-order thing may also face an issue with how much individuals will actually participate if it's all up to them in the privacy of their own home. There's a guilt/nag factor in the traditional model that is pretty effective. The individual model reminds me of Schoolpop, where everyone *should* have shopped through the schoolpop site before they went over to amazon.com (so the school could get its cut), but everyone didn't.
Thank you, Great Lakes Scrip is the company I was originally looking at but was concerned about the amount of time & work involved. The reason I asked about Simplified Scrip is that they seem to do the work for you, but it's a fairly young company and I was hoping for some input on them.
Has anyone here had any experience with or heard anything about this company? I've been looking at starting a Scrip program at our school but I've been concerned about the time/work involved, and from looking at this site the work is pretty much done for you. Of course, the list of vendors is not nearly as long as some other companies, but most of the major players seem to be on there and a smaller list may be more manageable at first. My biggest concern is how new the company seems to be, so I thought I'd ask the group of people likely to be the most knowledgeable about these things-the PTOToday brain trust.
