How to Motivate Children to Fundraise WITHOUT Prizes

Use These Five Ideas to get Students Excited about Fundraising

For years, schools have executed successful fundraiser by awarding prizes as incentives for students to raise money. Sometimes however, prizes are not financially available or students do not desire the available prizes.

The good news is - it’s entirely possible to motivate children to fundraise without product-related rewards. Try using one or more of these five ideas:


1. Focus on the end-goal. Have your students remember what the money is going towards. Is it going towards the school itself, a special cause, or a new playground? If you make the goal real and show what it takes to reach, students will be more likely to engage in reaching it.

2. Hang “thermometer” posters in the hallways and classrooms to directly track progress. Not only does this directly show how much your team has made, but it inspires the students to reach the top of the thermometer.

3. Show inspirational videos. Is your fundraiser for a specific cause or charity? Showing videos related towards the cause make it even more real. If possible, bring in a guest speaker who represents the charity or cause you're raising money for. If it is not cause-specific, you can still show other inspirational videos that show how positive action and giving can go a long way.

4. Slime the top-selling students. While this might sound ridiculous, this activity creates a lot of hype between the students. It's almost as if students dare each other to do their best at fundraising (and calls for a celebratory school wide slime-ceremony)!

 

5. Create a no homework pass for a day to the top selling student. Rallying students around the idea of no homework often has exponential effects.

Teach Your Kids the Gift of Giving

Children Learn the Gift of Giving with Lil' Shopper's Shoppe

This holiday season, like any holiday season, there will be a lot of shopping. While gift-giving is a key element in the holiday season, how can you get your children to learn a valuable lesson without becoming addicted to their shiny new toys? Teaching your kids about giving is very important. Now is the time for them to learn about spreading warmth and helping others. Lessons you can teach your children this holiday season include:

Thoughtfulness for Others
Witnessing the gratitude of others is a great way to help a child’s thoughtfulness grow and it’s a feeling they will want to repeat. Personalizing a gift is a great way to add a little extra touch and to give a child pride. Whether it is something as simple as wrapping the gift in the child’s artwork,or adding a personal message, small touches go a long way. Make sure to ask for your child’s input. Ask what they think would be best suited for siblings, grandma, grandpa, cousins, etc., and be sure to let the child “present” the present. Feeling included in the gift-giving process is essential to making the child understand thoughtfulness.

The Value of Money
A fun and fantastic way to teach children the value of money is to involve them in the gift buying process. If planning a surprise gift for a child, it may be difficult to include them. However, you can easily incorporate their own wish list into a lesson about value and money. You can teach children about shopping around for the best price and how to get more bang for your buck. This will not only make more thrifty shoppers, but also teach your child about worth and value.

Gratitude and Values
Of course kids love receiving presents at the holidays but what truly makes the season special is the goodwill around them. Perhaps most important of all, a child learns gratitude when receiving gifts. When you involve a child in the buying and giving process, it helps them to better understand the effort behind receiving a gift from others. Incorporating your child in gift giving helps them to appreciate what they receive and be thankful. Children learn to express thanks for big and small gifts, not just the ones at the top of their list that year.

 

 

Free Supplies makes using our Holiday Shop a Breeze

Gifts 'N Things offers a one-stop Holiday Shop for your school. The following list of free supplies makes execution a breeze and running the shop a joy.

Colorful Parent Letters                                                                                                                                  You’ll love these multi-colored letters as they’re the perfect way to invite your students’ parents for a fundraiser. We supply a whole range of these colorful English and Spanish parent letters addressed to both parents and in whatever quantity you need.

Budget Envelopes

With a shopping budget, parents can be very clear about how much they want to give towards the fundraiser. This marries convenience with practicality and makes your fundraiser enjoyable.

‘Coming Soon’ Event Posters

You can spread awareness for your Holiday Shop by using our ‘Coming Soon’ posters. These posters are in set templates that allow you to fill in the essential elements like the date and the place. You can place these in popular hangouts and pull a crowd.

Gift Bags

Any Holiday Shop is only complete with gift bags. Shoppers will have varied interests in the products and different budgets too. We supply three different sizes of gift bags so that you’re never falling short of the right kind of gift bags.

Decorative Tablecloths

Most Holiday Shops we help out with use tables as the standard choice for their display medium.

You can use our decorated and multi-colored tablecloths to help cover up your tables and make
them more attractive and standardized.

Tent Cards

This is a great way to exhibit your wares so that someone can find exactly what he or she is looking for. Our tent cards have been updated with photos and descriptions too, so that you’ll get a lot more from them.

Pre-coded Merchandise

 Our merchandise comes pre-coded, free of cost. Each code corresponds to a specific price. This solves the problem of looking through a list of items to find prices. You can just look up the code instead and speed up the checkout process.

Chairperson Planning Guide

The organizer of any Holiday Shop has a lot of planning to do and many important decisions to make. We’ve worked with many chairpersons in the past and we’ve created a planning guide to make things simpler for you.

Gifts ‘N Things is committed to make things simpler for the organizers of any fundraiser. We also
deliver all re-orders on the very next day, and we have a complete chairperson website.

What do you think of our free Holiday Shop supplies? Let us know in the comments below.

http://gntinc.com/

Fundraising involvement can go a long way.

Fundraising offers so much more then raising money. It also teaches responsibility and goal setting, both  being huge benefits for students to gain.  Fundraising puts the child in a role of being responsible for meeting deadlines, setting goals  and creating a plan. Children often gain confidence, improve communication skills, and learn about personal responsibility, which helps with future goal-setting and long-term planning. Fundraisers are also an opportunity for kids to work together toward a group goal while making a positive contribution to their school or organization.

Simple business skills like customer service, organization, time management, professional etiquette and balancing budgets are skills that will carry into potential careers and social settings. Simple skills like smiling, making eye contact, and using clear, confident speech are skills children need to develop for their future. We really think that handling finances is a huge benefit here and it’s a good idea to gain experience at a young age, something that will continually be part of their lives.

With over 35 years of experience, Gifts n Things, acknowledges that fundraising is a huge learning experience. We offer products ranging from frozen food to holiday themed school supplies. We take huge pride in being part of something that is so beneficial to kids in many different ways.

PTO Today

PTO Today is dedicated to helping parent teacher groups (like PTOs and PTAs) help their schools with information on fund raising, playgrounds and more. We are more than proud to have our company listed in August publication.

We want your feedback.

As we’ve said time and time again, we place so much importance on the satisfaction of our customers. We work day in and day out to produce high quality products as well as brainstorming new ideas to increase customer interest. It’s never been our intent to settle with consistently bringing customers the same variety of products – no matter how great we think they are – we want to introduce even better goodies to add to our product line on a regular basis. It’s our goal to truly live up to the motto that Gifts ‘N Things has something for everyone!

            Whether you’ve been a long time customer or have only done business with Gifts ‘N Things once, we want to hear about your experience. Any customer feedback you may have will be taken into consideration and implemented to make us stronger as a business!

Here is how you can write a Google review in 3 EASY steps!

1) Login to your Google Account.  Sign in to Google with your email and password or Sign up for an account. 

2) Search for a place to review. After you have signed in to Google, search for a place you would like to review in the Google search box.

After you have searched for a place or business of your choice, look for the “write a review” tab. Please note that both places will take you to the same place. Make sure that this is the business you would like to write the review for. If you do not see the “write a review” tab, try to make your search more specific by including the state, city or zip code. In the example below, PA was added to narrow down the search. 

  

3) Write a review. After you have clicked on “write a review”, you will be able to rate and describe your experience. When you are finished click the “publish” tab. Congratulations you have written a review!

Fundraising made simple.

Our main goal when you decide to fund raise with Gifts ‘N Things is customer satisfaction. There are three factors in our control that we focus on to ensure this satisfaction. These are providing top-of-the-line products, quality incentives to sell, and open and friendly communication along the way. These are the building blocks that have led us to achieving success in the past 30 years of operation. Fundraising doesn’t need to be the tedious process that gets an eye roll whenever it’s mentioned, which is why we aim to make it as easy AND rewarding as possible with these tactics:

1)     Online Shopping- We understand that some friends and family might be unreachable to get orders from because they live out of state or even further. This is why we started the online ordering system. It has the same benefits for the seller and organization as if the sale had happened in person!

2)     Prize Program- Let’s face it, sometimes kids need the proper motivation to sell. Our “Jungle Theme” prize program does just that! Rest assured that you’re not required to sell an outrageous number of items to earn a prize; the prizes start coming your way after you sell just one item!

3)     Computer Report of Sales- We keep an up-to-date detailed report of everything sales related such as internet sales, top sellers, prize summaries and more. The head of the fundraiser is able to view this report at any time but we also e-mail them to you periodically. This way you always know where you stand throughout the fundraising process!

4)     Orders Individually Packaged- Each order is individually packaged and labeled appropriately for each student. We’ve found that this makes the distribution part goes much smoother for everyone involved. We also include gifts and snacks in the packages as our way of saying “Thank You” to the buyers.

5)     Convenient Ordering Packets- Everything you need to start the selling process: brochures, order forms, parent letter, and prize program information is included in one packet. It’s easy to understand but if you should have any problems whatsoever we also include a pre-paid and self-addressed envelope to our headquarters.

The decision to fundraise with Gifts ‘N Things might be the easiest part of the whole process. What won’t be so easy is deciding between the large variety of products we proudly offer!

See for yourself: http://gntinc.com/brochures/perfect-presents/index.html