Whether you’re organizing an event for your school, sports team, community club, or organization, you probably know that motivated sellers are a key element to creating a successful fundraising campaign. If you’ve ever wondered how to keep your sellers excited, engaged, and motivated throughout the fundraising process, you’ve come to the right place! We’ve gathered a variety of simple, fun, and creative ways to help you ignite the fundraising spirit within your team.
Pull up a chair, grab a slice of pastry, and discover a series of motivation-boosting ideas that will have your sellers eager to start fundraising. Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
- Provide Sellers with Tips and Tools
- Get Parents Involved
- Increase Seller Participation
- Maximize Each Seller’s Efforts
- More Ways to Motivate Individual Sellers
- More Ways to Motivate Your Whole Group
1. Provide Sellers with Tips and Tools
When you give sellers all the tools they need, they will feel more comfortable when it comes time for them to reach out to supporters. If they feel comfortable, they’ll reach out to more people and have a better chance of reaching their goals. You can help prepare your sellers by…
- Encouraging them to practice asking people to purchase from their fundraiser
- Giving them details about the products they’ll be selling, so they can answer any questions people may have
- Teaching them the “why” behind their fundraiser. Supporters want to know what you’re fundraising for and how they can help you achieve your goal!
- Reminding them to say “thank you” to each person they talk to, whether they buy from the fundraiser or not.
For more information on how you can help prepare sellers for your fundraiser, check out our blog post on “How to Ask Someone to Buy from a Fundraiser”! It has even more tips and some scripts and social media post examples to get your sellers started.
If you really want to make sure you’re giving sellers all the tools they need to run a successful fundraiser, take steps to partner with a company that provides you with those tools. For instance, Butter Braid® Pastry dealerships each have a fundraising tool kit for you to utilize during your event. These tools can save your group time and effort, motivate your sellers during your fundraiser, and help you focus on meeting your goals. These tool kits include items like parent letters, fundraising tips and infographics, videos, social media images, and more!
To find out what kind of tools your local dealer has in their tool kit, reach out to them and ask when you sign up for your next fundraiser: https://myfundraisingplace.com/dealers!
2. Get Parents Involved
Organizing a fundraiser is a lot of work! Group leaders, like you, need support to get everything done before the fundraiser ends. That’s why it’s important you get parents and family members on board with your fundraising efforts. To do that, you need a plan that gets parents excited and willing to contribute their time, talents, and other resources. If you want to get more busy parents involved in your fundraisers, we recommend…
- Getting the kids excited! When parents see their kids are passionate, they’re more likely to want to join in.
- Making it as easy as possible for them to contribute. Send out information early and give them plenty of time to plan.
- Using multiple methods to communicate such as social media, text messages, phone calls, and emails.
- Offering a variety of roles. More positions = more people able to help
- Showing your appreciation to everyone who volunteers their time!
For more details on how these strategies work to motivate parents to volunteer, check out our full blog post on the topic!
3. Increase Seller Participation
The more sellers you get involved in your fundraiser, the more fun it is for everyone! Nothing beats the feeling of belonging to a supportive and enthusiastic team. When a majority of your group or organization participates, it makes each seller feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. Plus, more sellers means more products sold which means more funds raised for your group.
Take a look at the infographic above for four easy ways to increase seller participation in your next fundraiser. If you’d like to learn more about these tips, we have a whole blog post dedicated to increasing seller participation that you can read.
4. Maximize Each Seller’s Efforts
Motivate sellers during your next fundraiser by helping them to set a challenging but realistic goal for themselves. To do this, have them set their goal based on customers instead of units. This has two benefits.
- It pushes your sellers to achieve a more difficult goal.
- It increases the number of products sold per seller.
On average, each supporter buys roughly two items from a fundraiser. If you set your goal based on units, sellers stop fundraising once they sell that number of units. When you set your goal based on customers, you could double the number of items sold all while inspiring your sellers to aim higher than ever before.
5. Motivate Your Individual Sellers!
Do you want even more ways to motivate sellers to get involved in your next fundraiser? Here’s a list of creative ideas that can be used to motivate individual sellers.
- Pass for extra recess time
- Raffle – for every item sold, a student gets entered in a drawing for a prize.
- Pie toss – the winning student can throw a pie at their favorite teacher/coach/group leader.
- Principal, coach, or teacher for a day
- Exclusive lunch with a friend
- Pass for extra computer time
- No-homework-for-a-day pass
- VIP parking pass
- Free movie pass
- Teacher’s helper
- Favorite food in class
- Gift card
- Mystery grab bag
6. Motivate Your Whole Group!
If you want to go above and beyond just offering incentives for individual sellers, here’s some ideas that will inspire your whole group to get involved!
- Pizza party
- Game time
- Character day – dress in costume for a day
- Classroom or group dance party
- Ice cream social
- Movie and popcorn day
- Free reading period
- Dress-down day – no uniforms!
- Leave early on a Friday
- Group field trip
- Pajama day
- Karaoke party
- Playground picnic
As you can see, motivating sellers during a fundraiser doesn’t have to be a daunting task. With a dash of creativity, a pinch of excitement, and generous sprinkle of support from your fundraising partners and community, you can create an environment where sellers are encouraged to reach for the stars and exceed their goals.
If you need a little motivation for yourself, we have just the thing! In next month’s post, we’ll be introducing you to a brand-new recipe that you can make using the Cinnamon Pastry Rolls you bought during your last Butter Braid® Pastry fundraiser. It’s a new way for you to enjoy your favorite breakfast dish while also treating yourself for a job well done.
Until then, happy fundraising!
