Here is a blog post I recently wrote about this for JustFundraising.com:
All fundraising school groups are going to have to sell their items to generate money. Everyone starts with selling to mom and dad then moves on to friends. The more successful the campaign means the more people you will actually have to talk to. Here are a collection of sales tips you can use to help you while you are raising funds.
- Have fun and enjoy what you are doing. It is not necessary to have a canned speech and perform it by memory. You can talk to people and have fun with your campaign, the donors will pick up on this and sales will increase.
- Be honest while making the rounds for sales. You are a representative of your school group.
- People do not want to be told what to do. Your job is to make people feel good about donating to your school group.
- When you get a no, don’t take it personally. The donors are not saying they don’t like you; they just may not care for the product or have the money available at the time.
- For people who are nervous about selling a little preparation is key. By practicing your sales talk it will bring confidence. Again the goal is not to recite something word for word but to talk about your fundraising campaign with confidence. It might sound a little funny but try role-playing if selling is an issue with you. Spend time with people rehearsing just talking and getting past an objection or two.
- Avoid hard selling. There is no need to be pushy while fundraising. People like to help out and also enjoy buying. You may even be able to offer them the chance to show up to school to check out the new equipment, or the new uniforms for the baseball team. By being friendly and a good representative you just might pick up new volunteers along the way.
- If possible get a booth or a table in a high traffic area. Places like malls or local events. This will get you lots of traffic and potential donors that you can approach.
These sales tips are good for whatever sales you might find yourself in. You might even consider these tips good advice for talking to people and relating. Remember interacting with people will serve you better than just about any learned skill taught. A little preparation with these tips will insure that your fundraising campaign is both fun and profitable.
Thank you. I do feel a little better now. I sent out a reminder email to all the parents in our group and to the teachers thanking them for their time getting the art done and asking them to remind their students and families to get those orders in. The Weekly goes out today as well. I have asked the ESL teachers to send out translated messages to their families too. The robocall goes out Thursday and I will find out about whether there are morning announcements.
We have a school of about 950 kids, and a week before our fall (catalog) fundraiser deadline, we had 4 order forms returned. All the rest came either the day before it was due, or the day it was due--some even later. We even had an order come in last Friday, and that was almost 2 weeks past the deadline.
If you have some kind of a morning news program or morning announcements, also make sure you use that to tell the kids that they need to remember to bring in the money on (whatever your deadline date is). If the kids are excited about it, and remind the parents about it, the parents will buy.
I agree, people will wait until the last minute. For that reason, you should set your deadline about a week ahead of when you absolutely need something done.
Also, I find that reminding people face to face really helps.
We have a newly constituted PTO after the PTA imploded last year, and have started out slowly to build trust and provide opportunities for parent involvement above all. That said, we are doing one major fundraiser this year, a Great Wall of Art. All of the students have created art that will be transferred to tiles to be installed with donated materials and contractor time in the new year. Our school is a high poverty Title I school, so we went with a fundraiser that is fairly low cost. The cost of a tile is $10. The trouble is, we are halfway through the collection period (all the students art is created) and we have 7 order forms--7!!! We have posters up all over the school, including a beautiful banner, letters and order forms went home after two "here it comes" items in the weekly newsletter, as well as an explanation flier in the Welcome Packet we sent home. We have a beautiful display case with sample tiles set up, our bulletin board is up...we have a robocall set up to remind parents of the deadline. I just don't know what else to do. Has anyone else experienced this? What did you do? How did you save it? Those of us tapped to create a parent group after the PTA made an awful mess don't have a ton of experience, but I think we are really organized. We have had tables at all of the school events and have been slowly getting volunteers that we have responded to immediately, passed on volunteer opportunities too, thanked at every opportunity. Help!
