The phenomenon of school fundraising continues to be a steaming pile of BS. The goal of such efforts is to transfer money from point A to account B, where A ordinarily flows from parents and immediate family members. Maximizing the sources of A relieves the financial burden on family members, in exchange for increasing their time burden. To make the expenditure of time worthwhile, a wide net needs to be cast and a vehicle for acquiring the money needs to be provided that does not cost more than it is worth in the time expended. This usually involves selling a product of some kind. Optimally it is a product that would have to be sold by someone anyway, at an event that you would be spending your time on anyway. Concessions at a football game or track meet are an obvious example of this kind of effective fundraising that is worth the time invested.
These time investments may be made by those for whom time is very cheap, like the students or the subset of students involved in an activity, or parents who have a lot of free time on their hands. Inevitably, these parents with the luxury of free time end up in decision making roles where they choose modes of raising money that depend on parents having lots of free time to burn. Then they marvel at the lack of participation from parents who have no such free time to burn, or for whom the time expenditure would be far more expensive than simply forking over the amount of cash that would be produced. If it would be better for the parents to add a minimum wage part-time job and simply turn over all the earnings than it would be to participate in your s*** ass fundraiser, then you're doing it wrong in some way. If you choose to sell a product that 90% of the parent and peripheral attendee audience would never purchase, then you're doing it wrong. If you need parents to be professional marketers in order to make your fundraising effort to success, but you don't have an adequate number of parents who can serve as such marketers, then you're doing it wrong. Pick something that students can market themselves. But that won't happen because the only people making these choices are the ones who have a lot of useless cheap free time on their hands, who deeply resent it when other parents who don't have that luxury are not able to donate their time at the same level.
This is a universal experience we have observed for years now. The most recent manifestation prompting these reflections is that a truly dumb person has managed to guarantee that many fewer parents will participate going forward, at a time we really need the help and the fundraising. But when you s*** on people for no reason, while making completely stupid choices that anybody can see benefit only the company you're shucking merchandise for and not the group you're trying to help, you create a long-term situation where parents don't think it's worthwhile to participate. This will be puzzled over in the next three meetings, I'm sure. Why won't people come? Why won't people donate their time or purchase a $500 product that we would have made $25 on? Nobody knows.
Fundraising
Re: Fundraising
Most of our kids' high school fund raising involved them volunteering time selling concessions at sporting events, thank goodness. For some bigger projects, they'd go around to local businesses and ask for sponsorship. Before high school, there were some of the "sell candy" variety of fund raisers, and we usually just bought enough for our kid to meet the minimum requirement or perhaps get the lowest-level prize for selling enough and then handed out the candy (or whatever) to friends or family. Occasionally, they would sell these booklets that had coupons to a lot of local businesses, which was annoying because they were somewhat expensive and we didn't go to most of the businesses in the book, so it would have been more lucrative for them to just ask us to give them money rather than selling us the coupon book. Those sort of things bugged me. Thankfully, we didn't get any of what you're describing, of selling a $500 product that only nets them $25. But I'm sure there are some groups in the area that do just that sort of thing.
Re: Fundraising
Part of the problem is the huge disparity in surplus wealth donated to the school between certain schools and districts. So one football team, for example, has all kinds of extras for practice and travel, and the parents have big fundraisers with items auctioned or raffled off for hundreds of dollars. They sell gift baskets and jewelry and home furnishings and all kinds of crap. Then the people who have the leisure time to attend and hear about such events are pretty sure this is going to work at your school too, even though most of the parents are busy working and don't have that kind of surplus wealth. One year the group needed rolling carts and some electronic equipment and I was like, just let me know and I'll donate the purchase price when you get it. Then I don't have to deal with these fundraisers you know? Instead they decided that it was a good idea to buy these things and so they would fundraise for it, and that's what they did. Meanwhile I'm sitting here ready to donate it. Who knows how many hours people lost to that thing, or what they had to buy to generate the profits necessary to get a few hundred bucks for rolling carts and cords. The whole thing is mystifying.
It also bothers me a lot because it seems like an obvious explanation for some of the problems we see in schools these days. School in middle of poor neighborhood starts off with a fraction of the number of people participating in orchestra or band, for example. To grow these numbers they need instruments owned by the schools and other supplies so they can compete on some approximate level with the others. The other schools have every type of accoutrement they could possibly want - fancy trailers and expensive props and items that make the whole experience of band competition easy and convenient. It becomes fun and lots of kids are attracted to the process, and the ones who can pay cover the ones who can't pay. Kids from poor school go and have a poor experience relative to their inability to afford these things that they can see being used in front of them. They see how other groups are large and enthused and have all kinds of stuff they need. Meanwhile they look and feel like the poor cousins. This is b*******. If I can amass a few thousand bucks someday one of the things I want to do with it is create a fund for a school music program that doesn't get supported. It's got to be enough money that the interest could fuel their activities. But some of these groups have budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year! It's just unbelievable.
It also bothers me a lot because it seems like an obvious explanation for some of the problems we see in schools these days. School in middle of poor neighborhood starts off with a fraction of the number of people participating in orchestra or band, for example. To grow these numbers they need instruments owned by the schools and other supplies so they can compete on some approximate level with the others. The other schools have every type of accoutrement they could possibly want - fancy trailers and expensive props and items that make the whole experience of band competition easy and convenient. It becomes fun and lots of kids are attracted to the process, and the ones who can pay cover the ones who can't pay. Kids from poor school go and have a poor experience relative to their inability to afford these things that they can see being used in front of them. They see how other groups are large and enthused and have all kinds of stuff they need. Meanwhile they look and feel like the poor cousins. This is b*******. If I can amass a few thousand bucks someday one of the things I want to do with it is create a fund for a school music program that doesn't get supported. It's got to be enough money that the interest could fuel their activities. But some of these groups have budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year! It's just unbelievable.