First Step: Principal’s Office
Fundraising can be daunting, but I’ve got your first easy planning steps for starting your Walkathon laid out here. Our first step was to get our principal to sign off on our new walk fundraiser. It wasn’t that we needed fundraising permission, we needed her stamp of approval to interrupt school and take kids out of the classroom.
Outlining a Plan for Our School’s Walkathon
My co-chair and I walked the principal through our big idea (replace all of the little fundraisers with one big walk event), and then shared a rough draft of our ideas on:
- Length of fundraising period
- Teacher involvement
- Route
- Student grouping/staggering
- Timetable
- How lunch might be affected
- How parent volunteers would support
- How we might thank donors
Accept + Incorporate Feedback
We’re lucky that our principal was on board and had participated in similar events at other schools. She was open to our proposal, told us the “need to dos” and gave us some suggestions.
- Contact our resource officer and look into permit requirements (we were taking the students off campus).
- Review our photo-sharing policy (since we would be taking pictures of students).
- Include permission slips in teacher instructions/packets.
- Allow students to walk as grades (about 40 students at a time) and stagger starts by 10 minutes.
- Dates that were open/permissible for the event.
Next: Get the Gang Together
Once you know that you’ve got the greenlight to have your walk, you are ready to assemble your team. Starting a successful “walkathon” may seem really daunting, but delegation makes it extremely manageable.
Ideally this meeting takes place around two months before any date you’re considering.
What Roles Need to Be Filled?
We decided to break things out by:
- Fund Collection/Tracking
- Incentives + Teacher Coordination
- Route Coordinator
- Volunteer Coordinator
- Donor Thank Yous
When Should the Event Take Place?
Make sure to consider not just the school calendar (testing dates, long weekends, athletics’ fundraisers, etc.) but also popular community/sporting events. You don’t want to overlap too much with existing commitments.
How Long Will You Fundraise
When you have an event date (the actual walk), think about how long you’ll want to give everyone to meet their goal.
Keep in mind that your fund collector/tracker will be monitoring progress almost daily and the fundraising period can be disruptive to teachers’ school days.
We felt that ~2 weeks was most manageable for our team. We decided to start the day after Labor Day and run it through the next Friday. Our last fundraising day was also our event day. I really like this approach – 9 in-school days of tracking was manageable and we got to end the week on a fun note.