Effective Elementary School Fundraising

 

Elementary School Fundraising: Tying Up With Local Merchants

When doing elementary school fundraising programs, it is important to know how to tie-up with merchants in your local area. This helps your fundraising campaign increase its potential income since you will be doing free advertising with them in exchange for financial sponsorship. In this article, I am going to discuss to you how to build a good relationship with these merchants.

When organizing elementary school fundraising program for your school, it is better to obtain assistance from your local merchants. These merchants can help your fundraising program in a lot of ways so make sure that you can use that to your advantage. When asking them for assistance you need to think like a businessman and make sure that you’re successful. Put yourself in their position, and ask “what’s in it for me?” This reaction is called self-interest; it is a basic human instinct that drives action so you need to attention to this when organizing your strategy. Create a need for them; make them interested in your own endeavors and at the same time address their own self-interest. Since most business establishment would be hesitant at first to tie-up with somebody they don’t know, you need to build your relationship slowly. Trust is the first thing that you need to establish when tying up with your local merchant. Always try to give your merchant something in return for their support. Don’t ask them yet for anything, offer to help advertise their business at no cost at all. Do this by offering whatever you can help in order to increase their customer traffic. This includes giving out flyers, leaflets and other advertising materials that would gradually increase customer awareness towards their business.

After you have established mutual trust with one another, this will be the time that you are going to further present your fundraising plans. Make sure that they can also benefit from your project so that they will be interested to sponsor your program. Tell them exactly how they can benefit in sponsoring your fundraising program since that will their first concern. Show them that by funding your fundraising event, they can further increase their visibility to the community thus increasing their potential customers. Increased customer traffic means that their income could also increase which will please them very much. This is how your mutual understanding is supposed to work so make sure that you can hold your end of the bargain. You can even offer these services to numerous local merchants in your area so that you can also maximize your potential income at the end of the project. It would even benefit you more if the business they are running is already popular. In this way you won’t need to do much effort in advertising them since the business firm will already attract many customers and supporters. Just make sure that you get what they want and at the same time your fundraising event will also get what it needed. This also great if you plan on organizing another fundraising campaign in the future since you already established a good relationship with them.