How to Engage Parents in Your School’s Fundraising Efforts

In its community of parents and carers, there is a huge potential for your school to raise funds and gain volunteer support.

Many schools have a Parent Teacher Association through which fundraising projects are undertaken. However, these organisations are often limited to a small minority of parents, and fundraising potential is limited without increased membership and engagement.

With proactive communications, your school can attain the assistance of far higher numbers of parents and members of the school community in running, promoting, and organising school fundraising initiatives. Read this blog to see some of the steps your school can take to engage parents in fundraising efforts and give your accounts a boost in the coming year.

Turning Good Intentions into Participation and Contributions

Parents and carers tend to want the best for their child’s school. As a consequence, they are often very receptive to invitations to help. However, most also lead busy lives, which leaves little time or energy for out of work activities and creates a barrier for them acting on their good intentions for their child’s school.

In order to breach this barrier, your school needs to reduce the amount of work and effort parents and carers have to put in to be able to contribute to the school. This can be done by communicating with them directly and giving them the answers about how they can help the school.

Promoting a Fundraising Campaign

To raise money for extracurricular facilities or resources, to pay for refurbishments, or to replace the old school minibus, schools often run online fundraising campaigns. Unfortunately, just creating a go fund me page on its own won’t get parents piling in contributions. Any fundraising initiative must also be combined with a school communications campaign that makes parents and carers aware, explains what the money is being raised for, and makes it easy for them to donate.

This can be done by using persuasive social media posts that link to a fundraising page. Ideally these should be scheduled to go out intermittently over a longer period, so that you can regularly remind parents without irritating them with excessive requests.

Post-event your school should also be producing communications that celebrate the outcome and thank parents and carers for their donations. This helps parents see the value of their contribution, and crucially, makes them feel part of the community, encouraging them to maintain their increased level of engagement and support going forward.

Getting More out of The Fundraising Page

Once you’ve got parents to click through to the fundraising page, you should be using the page to its full capacity. As well as giving visitors a way of donating to the project in question, the page should also provide parents with information and calls to action about other ways they can help the school. For example, the page could:

• Link to information about the PTA.
• Show past successful initiatives and stories.
• Link to other services the school provides such as lettings of facilities.

By building a school fundraising platform well populated with content and calls to action that parents and carers can easily respond to, you are more likely to make parents and carers engaged with, and hence, make them more inclined to engage with you.

How We Can Support You

Does the extent of the communications described in this article sound like a lot of work? At Eduprise, we can build your school a fully functioning and written up fundraising platform and provide ongoing communications support that consistently gets members of your school community engaged and donating. If you’d like this for your school or trust, contact us today.