Since last Monday's meeting, I've spoken to a couple of people who have reiterated the argument that the monetary (and community) return from an auction may not match the effort expended. Both Scott Ringgold and Cambria Cox have independently presented similar ideas to me for smaller-scale events.

Scott has suggested approaching the Columbia City Cinema about showing a family-friendly matinee with a portion of the proceeds to GH. He also suggested that a benefit concert (a la the Pearl Django show of a few years ago) would be a good event.

Cambria has an idea to do a holiday shopping benefit with some of the stores and restaurants in Columbia City (Retroactive Kids, La Medusa, the Cinema, etc.) in addition to a child artwork focused auction (perhaps held at the C-City Gallery?). These might be two distinct events with the auction held in the spring. The holiday benefit could also involve a matinee at the Cinema as well as gift-wrapping service. Cambria expressed that she would be willing to take the lead on planning events of this type.

I hate to keep circling back around with this because I feel there is an urgency to start work on whatever event we will hold, but (with a couple of exceptions) I have not sensed much enthusiasm for a full-blown auction. It will take determined leadership to pull off this type of event and we don't have that at this point.

We currently have a fundraising gap of $18,000 in the 2008-09 PTA budget. This gap is the impetus behind the auction. In analyzing how other schools in the city are raising money, it seems that those schools which are raising more than GH all rely heavily on an auction. It seems as though an auction is the most likely way to raise this sort of figure in a single event. However, maybe it makes sense for us to chip away at this goal with two or three smaller-scale events. Maybe one of these smaller events could mature into something that would generate more funding in the years ahead.

Another prong in our strategy could be to devote more resources to the Annual Fund drive and grantwriting efforts. A suggestion has been made to produce more polished Annual Fund literature in a push to broaden the audience that might reach. I feel that the expense that we would incur for printing could be easily offset by the gains in giving.

What are your thoughts on what the mix of fundraising efforts should be?

It is assumed that the PTA will continue to fund all of the programs that we have paid for in the past. These amounted to nearly $15,000 for the past year. So, if we choose to go ahead with everything, we'll be looking at spending just under $70,000 in the coming school year.

The difficulty comes in that we need to make commitment to these new programs in the next month or so (i.e. before we have the money in hand to fully fund them).

In the current year, the PTA has raised roughly $25,000. The amount of fundraising has been increasing slowly throughout the past several years. We have around $35,000 in the bank.

We've begun to identify several ways in which we might increase fundraising, such as:

• integrating fundraising into existing events
• creating new fundraising events (auctions, benefit concerts, etc.)
• increasing promotion and emphasis on the Annual Fund
• pursuing grants
• doing more sales
• enhanced community outreach efforts (to local businesses and community members)
• etc.

Of these, I believe that grants have the potential to provide the biggest monetary impact. However, the catch is that there is usually a relatively long lead time between applying for a grant and receiving funds. We are now only in the exploratory phase of identifying grants to which we may apply. There is also a learning curve to the application process that we have to surmount. Therefore, I don't feel confident that we can project to have any grant dollars in the budget for the coming year. Obviously, I'm hopeful that we will, but I don't think that we can plan on it at this point.

That leaves the prospect of almost tripling our fundraising goals using basically the same methods that we have used in the past. Our cash reserves provide some cushion, but it would be a shame to deplete that hard-earned savings. Ideally, I'd like to be in a position that we are funding one year ahead, i.e. we have enough money in the bank at the end of each school year to fund all or our expenses for the subsequent year.

Do you feel confident in committing to raising $70,000 next year?

Should we (as the fundraising team) recommend that the PTA consider sticking to a smaller budget, either by denying funding for one or more of the new programs or cutting some existing programs?

Should we just “go for it” and rely on our savings if we fall short?

This interesting report from the Seattle Council PTSA shows total school funding for all schools in the district for the 2005-2006 school year. The "Self-help" column can be used to evaluate PTA funding (there are a couple of other items in that bucket, which are explained at the bottom, but I don't believe they're very significant overall).

You can see that the total amount of "Self-help" funding for all elementary schools was over $3.6 million, for an average of over $56,000 per school. When you take a closer look at the numbers you can see that there is a huge discrepancy among fundraising among the schools — a couple of schools brought in over $250,000 while a few others raised less than $5,000. The median amount raised by elementary schools was around $30,000.

I don't expect Graham Hill to ever "catch up" with some of these other schools simply due to demographics, but there's definitely room to grow our fundraising efforts.

Fundraising events:

1. Auction (live or silent) - this is a major fundraiser for many schools. Parents solicit businesses to donate items which are then auctioned, generally at some sort of banquet-type function. I'm pretty ambivalent about this approach, especially given the wide disparity in incomes within our community — my feeling is that a large portion of the school community may feel excluded. For an expanded discussion of both sides of this issue, see this post on the Save Seattle Schools blog.
2. Art and/or Experience Auction - auctioning student artwork and things like hosted dinners, outings, etc.
3. Carnival
4. Walk-a-thon (or Anything-a-thon)
5. Holiday Bazaar / Craft Fair
6. Book Fair (w/ Barnes & Noble or another bookstore) - Barnes & Noble agrees to donate a percentage of sales for a specific day to the school.
7. Family Bingo Night
8. Dine Out Night - local restaurants donate some percentage of their proceeds on a given day to the school
9. Benefit concert
10. Bunko/Poker Nights - an admission fee is charged ($20-30) a small portion of which is used to offset the cost of refreshments supplied by the host/hostess

Fundraising sales:

1. Giftwrap sales
2. Plant sales
3. Holiday Wreathes / Trees
4. Coffee
5. Rummage Sales

My preference is for fundraisers that can help solicit funds from outside the school community. In light of that, things that I think might be a good fit for GH would be a Dine Out for GH night (maybe Pizzuto's, Tuttabella, Jones BBQ, Geraldine's, Lotties, La Medusa, El Sombrero, Kawali Grill, Roy's, Kallaloo, etc. would participate) or a benefit concert (anyone have contacts with any local bands?)

Another half-baked idea that I had while not sleeping last night: an outdoor movie series. I'm envisioning something modeled on the Fremont Outdoor Cinema. We could earn money through charging a small admission fee as well as selling refreshments. We could do it on the school playground. It's definitely a half-baked idea in that I know nothing about getting a projector, movies (and exhibit fees), a screen, etc. I also don't know what the rules and restrictions might be for having it on school property. If it can't be done at the school, another potential site might be the Seward Park amphitheatre. Obviously there are some questions to answer, but I don't know of anything else like it happening in the south end and it could be a great way to connect with our community.

Any other ideas?

I'm not suggesting that this is something that we should be doing — in fact, I am against the practice from the standpoint of fairness and equality. On the other hand, I want to make sure that we are operating on as level a playing field as possible, and if others are doing it, I'd like to know why we do not even have the option.

Can anyone identify who it was that made this statement and on what grounds it was based?

The report on Graham Hill that the site provides is a bit stale (2003 is the most recent update). I am looking into what it takes to get this information updated.

Is anyone familiar with this site? Have we used it in the past? Is there any interest in exploiting it further? The only downside I see is that they charge a 4.75% fee on donations. However, the donor is given the option of paying this fee themselves. It would also seem that this amount might be offset by donations that we might not otherwise due to the sheer simplicity of donating on-line.

It would be pretty simple to add a link on our website directing potential donors to this service. Anyone have a differing viewpoint?

I visited the site and I found that Graham Hill apparently has an account on this service (ID: 110621). However, I haven't heard anything about it from anyone involved with the school or the PTA. I know that some other PTAs participate with this site, so I'm not so much concerned about whether it's a legitimate site, but more that perhaps the contact and payment information may be stale.

Does anyone know who the "Champion" might be for GH with Schoolpop?

I've noticed that several other local PTAs are participating in this program and it looks like a dead simple way to generate some additional revenue.

More details:
http://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/join

Any thoughts?