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Re: Need New Fundraising Ideas!
Fund raising is one of the best ways to impact the community. People are always willing to pay to be inspired or taught, even entertained.
We do 3 separate weeks of FLL camps in the summer to teach kids prior to the upcoming FLL season, this has not only brought in about 2 or 3 thousand a year but also has TRIPLED the amount of FLL teams in our area. We provide an advanced camp for students as well which assures that they'll come back and learn more.
Another thing we've found (on a slightly unrelated note), if we do these things while students are young they grow up and join the team. I'm an example of this. RUSH did FLL camps when I was in 4th grade I did it, I conned my mom into getting the school to start an FLL team, and grew up to join FRC. So this truly does wonders for not only fund raising but also recruiting.
There is also our Parent's Night out. This is basically an activity night for kids at a local middle school. We have plenty of things to do, and of course food for sale (because kids love food, and we love having $ to build a robot). Every 10 year old is ridiculously excited to see robots, so we like to show it off. This takes quite a bit of planning, and is a decent amount of work, but they make us about $1000 each.
In the past we did a garage sale of stuff (mostly junk) we got donated from the community. It, again, was a lot of work organization wise, but in the end was successful. We found the key was advertising.
Selling stuff works well and all, but it is probably not as profitable as community events, and for some students is more of a commitment than 3 hours on a Saturday.
I'll post more if I think of them and/or remember to come back to the thread, I know we've done other things, but it's 2 am...
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