Your guide to smart year-round fund-raising - includes related article

Instructor, July-August, 1994 by Cynthia Francis Gensheimer

Tired of fund-raisers that are all work and no profit? Try these 3 learning-rich and lucrative projects.

AUTUMN

SELLING HOLIDAY NOTE CARDS

The Fund-raiser: Each fall, students at Nishuane School in Montclair, New Jersey, sell note cards featuring their black-and-white drawings of local scenes, holiday motifs, self-portraits, and so on. The cards are sold in packs of one design, six cards for $5.

Learning Goal: to develop students' artistic talents and demonstrate practical applications of creative work.

Seasonal Link: Parents, faculty, and community members buy the note cards to give as holiday gifts.

Curricular Tie: Connect the project to art history by showing students the work of artists who have mastered black-and-white drawings (Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Thomas Nast; and contemporary illustrators like Edward Gorey, Saul Steinberg, and Sempe).

$$ You Can Expect to Make: With 700 students, Nishuane School sells $5,000 worth of note cards each year, for a profit of $3,000 after printing expenses.

What You Need: a black fine-point permanent marker and a sheet of 8 1/2-by-11-inch heavy-stock white paper for each student; plastic resealable bags; attractive stickers for sealing the gift bags.

When to Start: Begin the project the second week in September to deliver the cards by Thanksgiving.

What to Do:

1. Ask a parent volunteer to get price quotations from various printers. Tell the printer you want the cards printed on heavy-weight, 67-lb white paper. Nishuane students paid the printer 33 cents per card--prices will vary, of course.

2. Show students the various bids and ask them which printer they would choose. Are there factors other than price to consider, such as quality of the printing? You might develop math activities based on various printer's bids (for example, if Printer A charges 50 cents a card, how much will we have to charge for the cards in order to make a profit of $2,000?).

3. Devote a class period to creating the drawings, giving students time to do a few warm-up drawings.

4. When students are ready to draw their final designs, give them each a piece of the heavy-stock paper. Make sure they sign and title their pictures. You might wish to hand-write on the back of each card: Artwork done by a student from _____ School, 1994-95.

5. Ask a parent volunteer to photocopy and reduce each student's drawing to a 3 1/2-by-5-inch size; write in an order number below each drawing; staple the sheet to an order form to send home to parents. Give parents one week to return the forms with payment, but allow an additional week for late orders.

6. At the same time you send home the order forms, have parent volunteers work with students to contact local gift shops that might be willing to carry the note cards. Factor in store orders to the total number of cards you print.

7. Once all orders are in and paid for, ask a parent volunteer to bring the cards to the printer.

8. When the cards come back from the printer, have students and parents fold them, put six of each in a resealable plastic bag, and seal the bags with pretty stickers. Send the cards home with students.

WINTER

RAKE IT IN WITH A READATHON

The Fund-raiser: Each February, students at Webster Magnet School in St. Paul, Minnesota, hold a month-long readathon. Students find sponsors who pledge a flat dollar amount or a certain amount per minute read. (For example, if Manuela's grandmother pledges a penny a minute, and Manuela reads for 10 minutes a day for the month, her grandmother would owe $2.80.) At the end of the month, the student who reads the most and the student who raises the most money are awarded free tickets to a baseball game.

Learning Goal: to encourage students to read a variety of books

Seasonal Link: February is a good month to stay indoors and read a good book! It's also Black History Month, an appropriate time to explore the literature of various cultures.

Curricular Tie: For an even stronger language arts link, build in a reward system for reading books in different genres. Also ask children to complete two book-based projects of their own choosing--shoe-box dioramas, mobiles, a mini-play, and so on--by the end of the readathon.

$$ You Can Expect to Make: A school of 500 students hosting its first readathon can anticipate a profit of about $3,500.

What You Need: Parent volunteers to design reading-log forms, solicit donations of prizes, tally minutes read, and recruit people to do benefit readings.

When to Start: A month before the readathon, begin publicizing the event and preparing the readathon log sheets.

What to Do:

1. Consider giving your readathon a theme. For example, to highlight Southern writers, you might want to set it up so that some of the books students read must be by Southerners. Featuring books about other cultures is another focus that teachers have had success with.

2. Hand out reading-log forms to students and explain that they are going to raise money by getting people to pledge money for every minute they read during the readathon month. Students will keep track of their minutes on their logs, which they will hand in to you at the end of the month.