QotW 07-06-03: Fundraising
 

Summertime is down time for many teams, but just as many use this time to prepare for the upcoming school year and FIRST Robotics season.

Money is of particular importance to many teams and finding ways to raise a lot of it are sometimes key to having a successful, worry-free season.

Question of the Week 07-06-03: What has been your team's most successful fundraiser? How did it work, how much money did you make and how long did it last?

During the 2003 season, team 810 raffled a Mercedes Benz C230 sports coupe with a stipulation in place that made sure they'd make a profit from the raffle. This mean that if there were not enough tickets sold to cover the cost of the car, a cash prize would be awarded instead.

Ultimately, while the car was out of reach, the team made ~$13,000 and a student's parents won an additional ~$13,000.

What're some other amazing results?

Haha, we do jack in the fundraising department.

I guess that our most successful would be our one thing we do each year - a spaghetti dinner.

The local 'Loyal Order of the Moose' lodge hosts this by buying all the food for us. We get there a couple hours before the dinner starts and start setting up the place (for demos and stuff) and also start preparing the food (salad, ice cream, spaghetti). The dinner lasts from around 6-8. We got a little less $1000 last year from doing it. Most of the team members come to help out (we're a small team) and it is fun.

Wowh! never thought of a spegti dinner I ought to try that.
Except Ill do a barbicue!

Good thred!

^ It is fun :D

Fundraisers don't work that well unless the whole team is motivated to participate.

My team also sold these cards that had discounts on them for $10 each. I'm not sure how well it worked. A lot of people didn't want to sell them.

Wow that is amazing. I really do not know of any fundraising that my team has done. Then again I am pretty clueless. What we usually have done is take 5000 dollars from our technology budget. Now our club has its little own spot on the budget. Thank god it passed with a large margin. I really did not want to see robotics and my one advisor leave.:(

I'm pretty sure it's illegal for schools to have raffles of any sort in California. :(

One fundraiser we do every year is a little game called Penny Wars. In it, each class has their own jar, and for two weeks they compete to get the most points in their jar. Each penny is worth one point, and any other form of money is worth negative its value. For example, a quarter would be –25 points, $10 would be –1000 points. At the end, the class with the most points gets all the money in their jar(to go towards paying for their prom, yearbooks, etc), while all the rest goes to us. We normally only make about $500, but we’re a very small school and we haven’t done a very good job of advertising it in recent years. In a normal size school you could probably make a lot more, especially if you got people really excited about it.

This year we did two simultaneous carwashes in different cities and made over $1000.

I believe our most successful fundraiser would be our Pie Sale. We have a bakery (about 50 miles away from our meeting place) but it is close to some of the members, so it works out well. We sell the pies for around $7 and we make about $2.50 profit on each. I think we have made in the thousands, however all of our fundraiser money goes to our direct 'acconts' for travel and such.


P.S. I have warned the CD community before... but once again... NEVER attempt the sale of freeze pops. ;)

Hey, my team has a fundraising idea in the works, and before we go with it I want to see if anyone else has tried before, since its a bit....farfetched i suppose.

Our idea is.....HALO TOURNAMENT!

We think it just might work in our school, since it is made up of about 1000 males who all think they are the best at video games. We could easily network 4 X-Boxes together for 16 players at a time, and then charge an entry fee with some sort of excellent prize for the winners. I guess the amount of money we make here depends on how many participants we get...so this could be anything from a waste of time to a huge success. ....anyone have any comments?

Car Washes

We hate doin them but we get about $400 each one

Hmm? all you need is 4 boxes a hub 4 TV's A place to do it plenty of participants security and a decent size crew to keep everything running soothly, WAIT! That doesn't sound easy Does it? But if you think you can pull it off and profit from it go ahead it sounds like fun

My small little reply on this one (had to make another team oriented QotW, didn't you Maddie...): selling small advertising space on the team shirts works wonders.

Our school has this strange rule which forbids clubs and teams from holding fundraisers to raise funds for themselves... dunno why. That means all the fundraising we can do is just recruiting sponsors... not as much fun as raffles or video game tournaments.

I don't think so. RUHS has raffles all the time (I hope we're not breaking the law :) ).

I don't think we have a single most successful fundraiser but we are in the middle of one right now (thank you team 22). We are holding a summercamp using lego mindstorms right now and in 2 week we are holding an EDUrobotics summercamp. We only have 5 students right now but hopefully word of mouth will spread the news of this camp.