Step 1: Decide on a fundraising goal. Fundraiseres are always more successful when people are informed about the goal. Our goal was to raise money for playground equipment and we raised over $10,000.00! We are a K-5 school with 460 students.
Step 2: Get the support of all the teachers as they will be giving the spelling tests and grading them too. This is pretty easy to do as the teacher would be doing this on a weekly basis anyway. Every class had a list of 25 words. Even the Kindergarten participated, of course they were NOT ready for an actual spellling test yet! They were given a list of capital letter and were expected to write the appropriate lower case letter.
Step 3: Decide how you want to do prizes. One year each child's name was entered into a drawing for every $10 collected. All prizes were donated by local businesses. The following year we did graduated prize levels ($25 recieved prize A, $50 recieved prize A & B, $100 recieved prize A, B, C)and allocated approx 10% of the expected revenue for prizes. Both times we did the spell-a-thon every child in the school recieved a popcicle for participating on the day of the spelling test. We also gave the class with the highest participation level a pizza party.
Step 4: Prepare and distribute Spell-a-thon Pledge Packets to each student. Include on this packet the fundraising goal, and of course the pledge log which should have a column for name, address, phone #, pledge per word or flat pledge, total amount of pledge and amount collected. Also include a line for the number of words spelled correctly (which will be filled out by the teacher after the test date.) Our pledge envelopes were donated by a local business. We also labled each envelope with student name, grade & teacher.
Step 5: After pledges have been solicited the packets should be returned to the classroom teacher on or before the test date (ours are usually on Fridays)so she can fill in the test score. The following Monday, the teacher will return the pledge forms to the student so that money can be collected.
Step 5: Forms are once again returned to the school once the collection has been completed.It would be a good idea to have the collection occur towards the beginning of the month near a payday. I think this helps increase the amount of money collected.
Step 6: Now the money can be counted and the prize list generated. This will take some manpower, but it will be well worth the effort!
I hope this will be of some help to you. Best of luck!
Laura
[img]smile.gif[/img]
We have sponsored a Read-A-Thon, a Spell-A-Thon and a Math-A-Thon at various times over the years. All were very successful with the Spell-A-Thon being the easiest to do. [img]smile.gif[/img]
I am liiking for fundraising ideas that do not involve selling anything. More like the parents sponsoring the kids for a read-a-thon, walk-a-thon, etc. Has anyone had any success with something like this? Could you share some ideas?
