Crowdfunding for Schools and Education
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Crowdfunding for schools and education is on the rise. If you’re looking for an engaging, healthy fundraising event for your school or PTO, crowdfunding may just be it! Candy bars and cookie dough sales just don’t cut it these days with the rise of obesity and inactivity in our students and youth. That’s why more schools are turning to Fun Runs, reading challenges, Color Run fundraisers, and community serve-a-thons to teach students about community engagement, get them moving, and raise lots of cash for your school at the same time. Even better, crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraising work for all age groups, from kindergarten and elementary schools to high school fundraising campaigns.
DoJiggy is the industry expert in School Crowdfunding and Peer-to-Peer campaigns.
What is Crowdfunding for Schools, and What are the Benefits?
School crowdfunding is the process of asking your school community to support a cause via small donations. Often, peer-to-peer crowdfunding is used in conjunction with an activity, such as Run/Walk/Ride events. There are many benefits of crowdfunding for education, including:
- Crowdfunding allows your school or PTO to expand its reach and share stories with a greater number of people.
- As students fundraise on your school’s behalf, it decreases the need for fundraising staff and paid development time.
- Crowdfunding websites offer a unique way of empowering and engaging students and classrooms to raise funds.
- While it’s a superb way to fundraise, crowdfunding can also help your school ‘friend’ raise. When a person participates in a crowdfunding campaign, it allows more people to understand the importance of your mission or crowdfunding project, the lives that are touched by your school, and the needs that are met through raising vital funds and expanding reach through knowledge and exposure.
- Many events and projects work well as crowdfunding campaigns – simply select what you feel will be a successful campaign for your school and add the crowd funding component.
- P2P crowdfunding works for public schools, private schools, charter schools, elementary, middle and high schools. Even Universities run successful donation campaigns with crowdfunding.
- No candy bar or cookie dough sales are needed, but if your school wants to do product sales, we also support crowdfunding sales campaigns.
Crowdfunding will enable your school to expand its reach and open up new windows of opportunity by engaging students and teachers in fundraising.
Utilizing School Crowdfunding Software
Launch your school’s crowdfunding campaign for free, and be up and running in a couple of hours. Our crowdfunding software is a complete registration and peer-to-peer donation management platform for school fundraising events and university fundraising initiatives in which individual and team (think classroom or grade level) participants collect and track donations and pledges for your school or PTO. Crowdfunding for schools allows your school to exponentially multiply your fundraising dollars raised as each participating student and teacher taps into their social network to raise funds.
DoJiggy Crowdfund is a powerful fundraising platform that manages your school and academy fundraising events seamlessly with a mobile-first website and powerful back-end administration and reporting area. Administrators can easily configure free registration or import students with their page. School and participant fundraising goals, prizes, and a required event waiver are easy to customize. Supporters access their students’ fundraising page via a custom link and make secure online donations to your school.
- Easy participant registrations with few required fields
- Participant import for schools that want to generate pages for all kids without the need for online registration
- Personal fundraising pages for each student and classroom/teacher, including pictures and videos, a personal mission statement, and goal achievement progress
- Secure pledge (ie, per lap, minute, or other units of effort) and donation payments can be accepted with our Athon component
- Fundraising thermometers, leaderboards, and badges encourage participation and increase engagement
- Integrated prize management system to track and reward top fundraisers and classrooms
- Free text fundraising is included (for US schools)
- Business sponsor recognition and links
- Detailed financial and participant reporting
- Students can customize their fundraising page
- Schools can also sell custom products such as fundraising t-shirts, hats, and water bottles
- Included online technical support for all of your crowdfunding campaigns
Types of Peer-to-Peer & School Crowdfunding Campaigns We Support
Features and Benefits of our Crowdfunding Platform for Educational Groups
Our comprehensive crowdfunding software platform has everything at your fingertips. Start with our user-friendly, customizable fundraising website templates.
- Each student and classroom (or teacher) can easily customize their fundraising page to raise money for your school or club
- Participants can customize their webpage and monitor donations
- Works seamlessly with Stripe payment processing – you handle the intake of money directly
- Allows your supporters to easily take an active role in soliciting funds for your school or university
- Integration with Social Media allows students, teachers, and parents to easily post fundraising pages online
- Includes sponsor promotion capabilities for your local business supporters
- Offers the option of accepting flat-rate or per unit-of-effort pledges (i.e., per lap or mile) for your crowdfunding event
- Auto-generated email receipts and confirmations are sent for all online registrations and donations
- Detailed financial tracking and reporting are available in the administration area
- Real-time leaderboards for the top fundraising teams and individuals
- Crowdfunding pages can be integrated into our Simple Stores or raffle fundraising platforms
Tips for Crowdfunding Success at Your School
Working with hundreds of school crowdfunding campaigns, here are some fundraising tips we’ve learned to help organizations raise more with crowdfunding for schools and school groups:
- Select a specific project or goal for your school fundraising, and ensure your supporters know what you will accomplish. Schools have successfully raised money for new playgrounds, libraries, computer labs, and STEM programs. Letting donors visualize where their money is going will increase donations.
- Ensure that your crowdfunding website is mobile-responsive with mobile giving features enabled. Most social media interaction is done on mobile devices, and your crowdfunding website will be accessed through social media.
- Stories are of utmost importance in fundraising. Students and teachers should share their reasons for loving the school and the importance of the funds raised.
- Individuals raising and giving funds must be able to see the progress of their campaigns. Our websites use fundraising thermometers at the campaign, classroom, and individual fundraiser levels.
- Every crowdfunding campaign must be shared on social media with ease. Ensuring that individuals can easily share links to events and the campaign itself creates easy access for people wishing to give their financial support.
- Private schools, academies, and university crowdfunding campaigns should seek to target school alumni.
- Your role as an administrator is to support and motivate your participants. Create weekly campaign progress reports sent out to each classroom so that everyone understands where the campaign stands in terms of goals and which individuals are the highest performers.
- Weave a culture of gratitude through every step of your campaign progress. By ensuring participants and their parents feel appreciated and supported, you will increase the likelihood of their enthusiastic support and future participation. A simple thank-you note to parents is much appreciated.
- Incentivize and reward your students with great Athon prizes.
Crowdfunding by Grade Level
There are always further considerations for your crowdfunding campaigns, which depend on the grade level of your students. High school fundraisers can be largely managed by motivated high school students who love technology and gaming, whereas elementary school fundraising is largely managed by parents and PTO groups. Read our articles on these groups to learn more about crowdfunding at the appropriate grade level for your students, or contact us for information on crowdfunding and peer-to-peer fundraising for your school.
Elementary & Pre-Schools
Elementary and Pre-Schools schools:
- Crowdfund with School Fun Runs, read-a-thons, and move-a-thons
- Ensure privacy features are enabled for young kids
- Rely on the support of PTO and parent groups
Middle & High Schools
Middle and High Schools:
- Crowdfund with Color Runs, dance-a-thons, and service fundraisers
- Allow students to personalize fundraising pages and engage with gamification tools
- Campaigns are often run by booster clubs, student councils, and other groups within the school