sponsors and Fundraising

[treffk]

Team 1802 has started to do nights at local fast food restaurants and generally makes a couple hundred through each of those. Common ones are Culver's and Chick-fil-A, but Panda Express, Sonic and Jack-n-the-Box does it as well. I also know Chuckie Cheeses used to do it as well if you have younger crowd to market to. Usually these nights are set up in advance and your team would pass out flyers asking people to come to the fast food place on that night between certain hours. Sometimes he location will do x percent off their total sales others the customer physically has to hand them the flyer. This is normally easy to set up and very little work for a couple hundred dollar profit.

Another thing we did for years (until we took over) was help set up and run a local craft show. This was a few hours the night before the craft show setting up and prepping for the following day. The day of the craft show the students would help the crafters bring their items in and helped with general things around the show including the concessions stand. When the show was over the students would help the crafters pack up and get everything back out to their vehicles. The organization running this was apart of the school and normally provided $200 to $300 for the services. You could check with local craft shows to see if this is something they would be willing to do to help out local youth.

One thing I did this past season was one day after school I picked up a few students and we went out to local small businesses/offices and a few larger chain stores and provided them with a sponsorship letter that explained who we were and that we were trying to come up with the funds to purchase the smaller c-RIO. This can be tedious going from location to location saying the same thing over and over and being told that they will have to pass it along. We did eventually find one doctors office that agreed to help us purchase it. They gave a base contribution but said if we did not find anyone else they would help for the rest of it. Small mom and pop businesses, while they don't always have the profits that big box stores do, can be willing to help in small forms, even $25 helps.