Successful fundraising is essential for both small and large sports team. During challenging economic times, it can be rather tricky for sports team to achieve their specific financial goals. It is essential to avoid common pitfalls that can doom many potentially successful sports team and generate enough money at lower risks. For small sports teams, it is possible to ask athletes to sell specific services and products. However, it many cases, it isn’t a good idea. Often we could expect to get dismal profits and plenty of aggravation. In reality, any athlete would hate selling stuff.
This activity can be considered as time consuming and distract them from performing actual sports-related activities. Even for professional marketers, selling is challenging enough. For athletes, it can be nearly impossible and they often don’t have the necessary skills to sell something. We should be careful of letting a fundraising company to work with us. In some cases, they simply take a large proportion of money they raised. The total amount of money that we collect should be nearly equal to the amount we use for actual sports activities.
In many cases, it is a good idea to ask supporters for some amount of money. However, it is possible that we are asking too little for them. We shouldn’t waste a good opportunity to maximize profit by asking too little from supporters. Low dollar transactions may not be enough to cover our financial expenses and running a sports team can be quite expensive. Many sports teams seek to organize multiple fundraising campaigns during a single season. However, this approach could fail to work. The team could sell cheesecakes in May, hold an auction in June, host a bake sale in July and so on.
It should be noted too many fundraising campaigns could wear us out. There are times when we confront the “fundraising fatigue”, not just the sports team, but also supporters and sponsors. People could start to run out of enthusiasm, patience and time. Instead, we should focus on having a concentrated effort, so we can easily accomplish our goals in a relatively short duration of time. As an example, days instead of weeks, or weeks instead of months. It is a good idea to start a large fundraising campaign that covers a season or two. This will make everyone feels more focused and more productive.
Fundraising campaign won’t be effective if we allow participations in it as optional. We shouldn’t be a fundraising wimp. We are able to gather more revenue, it could mean purchasing new equipments for the team and everyone is going to benefit. Participation should be a real requirements and this will prevent less motivated individuals from avoiding a contribution. Coaches should be able to demand full participation and everyone needs to give best effort. Coaches who offer a fundraising campaign as something optional will find it very difficult to achieve specific financial goals.
