School fundraisers don’t fail for want of a good cause or school interest among the local community. What typically fails is the administrative load of running a school fundraiser over weeks, transferred to the shoulders of 3-4 already busy full-time staff members at the school. Running a good school fundraiser is not a matter of choosing the right online fundraising platform, it is a matter of setting up payment, people and records well before the first ask is made.
Reduce the number of places money can land
For every new payment channel like cash, bank transfer, card reader at a school gate or online checkout at a school fundraising website, new formats for the corresponding records will be created. While admins might not be able to prevent people from paying in cash, they can create online payment options as the easiest way to pay for most people.
It’s essential to enable donations by cash as well as online. When online checkout is enabled it must be possible to complete the payment without opening an account beforehand. The online checkout must enable the payment methods most commonly used by your online donors. It’s essential to record sufficient data to attribute each payment for the amount paid by each donor. Rebuilding data from bank statements to attribute donations in due course will be too time-consuming.
Fields worth capturing at checkout
- The beneficiary group, selected from a controlled list rather than typed free text
- Gift aid or tax receipt consent, where applicable in your jurisdiction
- Whether the donor wants to be acknowledged publicly, and under what name
- An email address validated at entry, so receipts do not bounce
- Employer name, if matched giving is realistically available in your area
Give volunteers narrow roles with clear boundaries
Clearly define roles and scope for volunteers before they start work on the campaign (i.e. The decisions they need to make and the time frame in which they need to make them and who they are accountable to).
Recover restricted time to grant access on a class by class basis to allow them to view their own page (including any relevant data), view Donors, see if others have paid for them, etc. Do not grant them the ability to view the full Donor Database, to issue refunds, to change status of Payouts section, etc.
A workable split of responsibilities
- One treasurer or finance lead who owns reconciliation, refunds, and payouts, with a named deputy
- One communications owner who controls the message schedule and approves outbound copy
- Several group champions who promote to their own class, team, or year and answer local questions
- One data owner responsible for consent records, retention, and deletion requests
Choose the collection model that fits the ask
When reviewing different types of fundraising campaigns, schools need to consider the level of administrative burden involved in each and how they can be managed within the confines of the volunteer hours available to them. If the volunteer hours are thin, a tool built for online school fundraising will carry more of the tracking work than a spreadsheet ever will. Most schools choose fundraising types that the school has used before, but this does not mean that all fundraisers are equal.
| Model | Admin load | Best suited to | Main risk |
| Direct donation page | Low | Capital projects with a clear target | Donor fatigue without a story |
| Sponsored activity | Medium | Whole-school participation drives | Tracking individual pledges |
| Product sales | High | Communities that expect a tangible return | Stock, delivery, and margin erosion |
| Ticketed event | High | Annual flagship occasions | Fixed costs incurred before income |
| Recurring giving | Low ongoing | Sustained operating support | Slow start, needs year-round stewardship |
Make the administration repeatable rather than heroic
Institutional memory, what past years’ events looked like and how they were organized, is often the hardest thing to keep track of when it comes to school fundraising. Use your best practice from every campaign to organize the next year’s events. Make a document to keep messages sent, a list of all suppliers used, rates of return etc. Store it somewhere the school has control over (not the account of the volunteer).
Reconcile the income weekly, not at the end of the campaign. This allows for a re-look at any ‘suspicious’ transactions and any errors to be corrected before the information is lost. All online fundraising platforms can export transaction information in a format that can be imported into your bookkeeping software, thus eliminating the need to manually re-key the information.
Questions to settle before launch
- Who holds the payout account, and who authorizes transfers from it
- What the refund policy is, and who may apply it
- How long donor records are retained and who approves deletion
- What happens to funds if the target is missed or the project is canceled
Measure participation, not just totals
Measuring and evaluating your efforts on school fundraising campaigns will also help you track and improve on future campaigns. Look at the percentage of families from your school community that contributed any amount to your efforts, the average amount donated by each family, and the percentage of repeat donors from previous years. Fundraising campaigns that are comprised of mostly very large donations are extremely fragile and will not fare well in future years.
