Ready to raise more for your PTA? With busy schedules, virtual fundraising is the way to bring in more donations and connect with those busy families at your school. Read on to learn how to host one and some creative ideas to bring in more funds.
When it comes to raising funds for your school’s PTA (parent-teacher association) or PTO (parent-teacher organization), you’ve likely done the tried-and-true methods. Bake sales, Fall festivals, rummage sales, and more are all great ways to raise money for your school.
But after 2020 and the push for more online activities, if your PTA isn’t offering virtual fundraisers, you could be missing out on even more income!
You don’t need to settle for the same old fundraising methods. Get a little creative and see all the possibilities when you fundraise virtually!
Aside from the pandemic-driven need for virtual events over the last two years, there are plenty of reasons why your PTA or PTO should consider hosting a virtual fundraiser.
Once you decide that a virtual fundraiser is a right move for your PTA or PTO, we’ve got you covered next with 5 steps.
First, you’ll need to get organized and be sure you’re on the same page with the rest of your PTA. Have a meeting to establish answers to the following questions:
Once you have a consensus on these answers, you can move on to step two.
Pro tip: If you haven’t already, be sure to review this guide to National PTA Resources to ensure your PTA is following the established rules and guidelines for fundraising.
The most successful virtual fundraisers will have some kind of gimmick to attract more donors. Think of it this way: the more fun your supporters think they might have with your virtual fundraiser, the more tickets you’ll sell and donations you’ll receive!
Here are some ideas for virtual fundraising events pulled from our nonprofit blog: Virtual trivia night, virtual walk fundraiser, and virtual raffle
Other ideas include a read-a-thon, a bake-off, and a jump rope competition–the possibilities are endless! Get creative and think of something that connects with your school and your students.
Check out Ortega Elementary’s read-a-thon, where they raised $6,000 for their school through pledges.
If you don’t want to host a virtual event, you might consider just running a virtual fundraiser by setting up ways for supporters to give online and sharing those ways with your network through email, social media, and peer-to-peer fundraising.
Northwinds Elementary’s PTO did just that in their simple online fundraiser. The below fundraising page is created on Donorbox. The PTO also encouraged students to participate in fundraising by offering small prizes.
Whatever kind of fundraiser you decide to run, it’s important to have the right tools for the job.
To run a virtual PTA fundraiser successfully, you’ll need some powerful tools that will make it easy for you to collect donations, sell tickets, and share information.
Online event pages are perfect for selling raffle tickets or just tickets to your virtual fundraiser event.
With Donorbox Events, you can quickly create a page with images, videos, and a description and add an unlimited number of tickets. You can easily share your event page to start selling the tickets. You can even prompt ticket buyers to donate additional funds to your PTA. Purchasers will receive an automatic receipt and the ticket in their inbox, meaning less work on your end! You can also effectively manage sold tickets and purchasers’ details at the backend.
Donorbox Events also lets you embed the ticketing form on your website. You can also fully refund a ticket amount if need be. Your purchasers can use Apple Pay to make their payments.
The below ticketing form example is taken from a successful PTO fundraising event that you can refer to for ticketing and pricing ideas for your next virtual fundraising event.
Crowdfunding is already a familiar concept to most of your supporters: many people donate a little bit of money toward one common goal. When the crowd comes together, they can do something really powerful!
Donorbox Crowdfunding is easy to set up and lets you accept donations securely, protecting both your supporters and your PTA. This is an excellent way to fundraise for your PTA because you can generate momentum through a dedicated “updates” tab and the donor wall utilizes social proof to encourage more to give.
You also get other features like a subscription button to help engage visitors and potential donors. You can then choose which updates you want to send to these people. Donors automatically get added to your “subscribers” list.
Check out what Delevan Drive Elementary did with Donorbox Crowdfunding to raise over $10,000 through their 2020-2021 online Koala Giving Tree campaign. With just 169 donations, they raised $10,000+ for their PTA! That’s the power of the crowd.
Let the members of your PTA or PTO do some of the work by starting their own peer-to-peer fundraising page. You can even get the students involved!
This is an easy, fun way to get more people involved in your fundraiser! Peer-to-peer fundraising would be ideal for things like read-a-thons where students might be looking for sponsors. With their own fundraising pages, they can easily collect donations that go straight to your PTA or PTO, with no administrative work on your end.
Donorbox Peer-to-Peer lets you easily turn a simple online fundraising page into a peer-to-peer campaign. You can then invite your best supporters from the tool itself. They will receive email invitations from Donorbox and can easily sign up to create customized fundraising pages for themselves. All donations from all peer campaigns go to your original campaign.
To be able to host and stream virtual events, you’ll need a tool that makes it convenient for you as well as your attendees. Airmeet is a great option in the sense that it also integrates seamlessly with Donorbox to let you add the Donorbox donation form to the live online event.
With this integration, your attendees can easily make donations during your live stream. It encourages more people to make a donation since they won’t have to navigate away from the event. It saves time and effort on their part. And it enables you to make it easier for people to give while also enjoying the event. Here’s how it looks.
Learn more about the Airmeet and Donorbox integration on our blog.
Once you have the parameters of your fundraising established–timing, goal, budget, theme, and scope–and you have your tools set up, it’s time to get the word out!
As a PTA or PTO, you likely know the communication channels that work best for you. It’s important to utilize each channel, though, to make the most out of your time spent advertising. You’ll want to reach as many people as possible!
If the budget permits, try Facebook and Instagram ads to reach more people than just your parents and students. Come up with a grade-A idea so that more people are attracted to your ads. You can also get in touch with a local newspaper or channel to spread the word to a wider range of people.
Once you run your fundraiser, be sure to share the results with the other parents at your school, whether they are part of the PTO or PTA or not.
One great way to do this is to post an update to your crowdfunding page as Delevan Drive Elementary did here. This makes crowdfunding all the more interesting and convenient for online fundraising.
But also, leverage your social media accounts to send out updates and highlights on a regular basis. Be transparent about how the funds you’ve raised will be used to make your school better for its students.
This will set the groundwork for the next fundraiser you run. The more your supporters trust you and feel good about giving, the more likely they are to give more in the future!
You don’t have to rely on events or even just generosity to make money for your PTA. Consider partnering with one of the many businesses that offer product fundraisers like Krispy Kreme. You can ask your fellow PTA or PTO members to sell donuts to support your organization. The best part is this can all happen online, too!
Ada Vista Elementary created the below event-ticketing form to sell t-shirts for their virtual PTA fundraiser. They used Donorbox Events for this fundraiser to be able to add multiple levels for different sizes. This helps people choose the size and make payments accordingly. As you can see on the event page, they’ve already sold out all tickets and have stopped taking orders.
You have something unique going for you–your school! Use the school mascot in your event or fundraising theme.
Consider reaching out to alumni, too! Just because they don’t attend school anymore doesn’t mean they don’t want to support their alma mater. If you make a compelling enough case, you can absolutely win the support of those nostalgic for the good ol’ days.
Partnering up with businesses in the community is a win-win: you get more donations, and they get free advertising (while looking good, too!).
You can ask local restaurants to donate a portion of their sales to your PTO (and encourage everyone you know to eat out that night!). You might even find a community partner willing to match a certain level of donations, which incentivizes more people to give.
Donorbox integrates with Double the Donation to help nonprofits add a donation matching widget to the donation form or anywhere else on the website. This encourages people to search if their employers match donations. As a result, nonprofits get to double, even triple donations via the company donation matching initiative. Check out how Coleman PTO is leveraging the employer donation matching widget on their donation form.
The most important step for running a virtual PTA fundraiser is to just get started.
And when you are ready to get started, we’re here to help with powerful fundraising tools for any kind of online fundraising. You can use Donorbox to create multiple fundraising campaigns for each of your events, online or offline. This helps you better analyze campaign performance, donations, and donors. You can also use features like Text-to-Give to encourage people to quickly make donations from their smartphones. Younger parents would love the convenience. Donorbox also allows donors to easily repeat donations on the go with the QuickDonate feature.
Explore all these donation-boosting and simple-to-use features on our website to get better insights. 80,000+ organizations are using us across 96 countries. You can sign up for free and get fundraising right away!
Check out Donorbox Premium – the ultimate success package for nonprofits willing to take their fundraising to the next level. Get access to expert fundraising coaches and tech wizards. Receive great support whenever you need it and powerful tools to boost donations. Pricing is personalized for each organization. Book a demo now!
Want to learn more about how to raise money for your PTA and school? Looking for free resources to boost your donor management efforts? Explore the Donorbox Nonprofit Blog. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to receive a list of our best resources (including podcast episodes, webinars, guides, blogs, product updates, etc.) in your inbox.
Lindsey spent years wearing many hats in the nonprofit world. Whether she was helping arts nonprofits with their messaging and content, planning a fundraising gala, writing an NEA grant proposal, or running a membership program with over 400 members, she learned how to navigate – and appreciate! – the fast-paced world of fundraising. Now, she loves sharing those hard-earned lessons with the Donorbox community.
Subscribe to our e-newsletter to receive the latest blogs, news, and more in your inbox.
Lindsey Baker Bower