Working with your team, you’ll need to make a plan on how to motivate and collect for your Walkathon. Read on for some easy tips and things to consider.
Motivation
While lots of companies will focus on the individual student goals, I like to set a homeroom goal based on how many students are in the class.
Don’t get me wrong – each student has an individual goal (total amount needed / number of students in school = student goal). We just don’t want to add to student stress.
This may be unpopular but, I don’t like to hand out trinkets as incentives. Instead, teachers chose their own incentives based on their students for reaching 25%, 50% and 75% (wacky socks, extra recess, no homework, etc.). Our PTO promised that homerooms that reached 100% would win a donut party.
How to Collect Your Donations
It’s important to be able to take digital payments in this day and age. You probably already have a system for this (maybe a charitable Venmo/Paypal or Square store?), but if you don’t then it’s worth exploring how you can collect credit card payments or echecks to reduce the friction between approaching donors and collecting their money.
If you’re looking for a recommendation, I can’t say enough good things about Cheddar Up’s Collections. My PTO subscribed to the Pro Level for our fundraiser and ended up using it year round. Read more about why it’s my favorite here.
Things to consider when evaluating your options:
- What fees are associated (credit card transactions, subscriptions, etc.)
- How will you be able to track donations?
- Are you able to create custom questions like grade/homeroom/student?
- Can you export payment data?
*Full disclosure – since I started singing Cheddar Ups praises, I’ve been offered an opportunity to partner with and review their Teams offering. I’m thrilled to help more PTOs find this service.