Always wanted to try a multi-school team shoot fundraiser. Getting local teams from around the area to shoot, participate, network and mix a little bit. As a participant, when you sign up you just pledge your round's entry to a specified team/school. The more the school's team promotes it, the better the fundraiser for them.
I really like this idea! Somehow incorporating shooting, and a competition for other teams as well.
I have to say, our club has kicked butt on fundraising. As of today, we have all of our spring ammo paid for (240 flats), we have some kids that have already registered for the season, and paid. And we have sales from our Gun Bingo/Gun Raffle table and package sales, and our Dream Hunt raffle ticket sales money in our account, and we are over $40,000 in our account as of this morning. And the only things we need to pay yet, will be the registration with the clay target league for each kid, and their championship registration for Alexandria, and spring rounds to the sportsmens club we shoot at. Plus, we still have 2 big fundraisers to go.
Here is another fundraiser we do, to help raise money, but also to help kids out.
Remember the old "read a thon" or "bike a thon" things that we used to do as kids. Someone would sponsor you "x" amount for reading a book, or they would sponsor you "x" amount for miles biked during a marathon? We do something very similar. And i believe i shared our sign up sheet with RCopiskey for it.
It's called a "shoot-a-thon". We hand out sign up sheets at our first spring meeting. They must be turned in the week we shoot our reserve score. Theres a blank for "name" "address" "phone number" and "amount per target hit" spot on it.
How it works is, the kids have 250 competition targets for the Clay Target League for the spring season. And they will go around and ask people to sponsor them a certain amount per hit target. There's a spot where they can mark $.10, $.25, $.50. $1.00, or other. And the donation is based off of that. So if Johnny gets his grandma to sponsor him $.10/hit target and he hits 200/250 for the spring scoring season, at the end of the season, he collects cash/check from her for $20.00. And goes all thru his list, to collect from everyone.
So last year, we had one kid that had a total sponsorship of a little over $13/hit target. He hit 186/250. He alone brought in almost $2500 from sponsors. It wasn't many big sponsors, it was alot of $.10 and $.25/target sponsors. But his mom works at a bar, and she would convince people to sponsor him. And at $.10/target, people would pay $18.60. And at $.25/target they would pay $46.50. So it's not like we were "duping" people into large amounts. We put the kids average on each sheet from the prior year, so they knew his/her average and could do the math before they committed to an amount.
Now here's where the benefit is to the kids. What we did, as a club. For every $1/hit target of sponsorship, you would get 1 ticket into a drawing for prizes. So he had a total of 14 tickets into a drawing at our club banquet. He recieved 13 for the $13/hit target. Plus, 1 more for doing the fundraiser. Our club banquet is 2 weeks after the season ended, so we knew what kind of dollar amount we would be working with. And we announced before we started the fundraiser, that we would be giving away an SKB 90TS to someone in that drawing. Well, that fundraiser brought in roughly $15,000 for our club. So, we ended up giving away the SKB 90TS, an SKB Century 3, and Browning BT99. We contacted Shamrock Leathers, and they gave us a discount on some shell pouches as well. And also got some round punch cards from the club we shoot at for prizes. At the end of the day, we still profited over $10,000 from that fundraiser alone. And the kids did the work of getting sponsors, and working to get better scores. Plus, 3 of the kids got a gun at the end of the season at our awards banquet. Our awards banquet is at the club, so those 3 kids didn't waste any time, and put some rounds thru their brand new guns immediately after the banquet.
Our goal with all of the fundraisers we do, is to drastically lower the costs for the kids, and down the road, to build our own range at some point. As a 501(c)(3), we have done very well. Our program went from charging $235/kid, plus them having to pay Clay Target League fee, and Alex fee, and only shooting 2 rounds a day, once a week. To now shooting 2 days a week, 2 rounds each day, and the kids only paying $200 total. We figure for the amount of shooting we do, it costs us just under $600/kid with all fees. And our goal is to fundraise atleast $400/kid just to cover our costs. Plus, an additional $200/kid to earmark for our potential range down the road.
Our goal, is to have our own range, so the kids can shoot 3-5 days a week. Our athletic director at the school doesn't acknowledge us. We aren't participating 5 days a week, so we aren't a sport, we don't matter, and shouldn't get any help from the school. Which is why we went the route of forming a club as a 501. They even went so far as to take $100 from the $235 registration fee years ago and put that into the athletic dept. And only allowed us $135/kid to work with. Which is why we had to do something different. Now, with the costs of ammo at $80/flat from Vista, and range fees of $7/round, we wouldn't be able to sustain our program at $135/kid after the school took their cut.
We are also in the works of putting together a scholarship that will be available to the class of 2024. We don't know all of the details of it yet, but it will be for a kid that is in trapshooting in high school. We have to figure out what sort of criteria we will be putting on it yet. But that will be coming down the road.
