Choosing a School Fundraising Company – 4 Important Considerations

School fundraising companies can literally determine the success of your school fundraiser. A great fundraising company will make the experience easy, enjoyable and profitable while a bad company can make fundraising difficult. Knowing what to consider when choosing your school fundraising company will help you to choose a great provider the first time around.

Reputation

Reputation isn’t everything, but when choosing a school fundraising provider it can be a great place to start. Look for a company that has an established reputation working with schools. You may want to talk with other schools in your area to find out which fundraising company they use. A company with a great reputation will have the skills and experience necessary to help you succeed in the fundraising process. You can also ask your fundraising provider for references if you want to talk with past clients before making a commitment.

Profit Margin

Profitability is another important consideration when choosing a school fundraising provider. Each company determines the profit margin that they will offer to schools and you will find that profits can vary greatly from company to company.

Most school fundraising companies offer schools a percentage of each sale. Look for companies that offer a high percentage. Remember that fees, handling charges, shipping and other expenses can take away from your profits, so be sure to factor these expenses in when making your comparisons.

Customer Service

Fundraising can be difficult, but a great school fundraising company will help you throughout the entire process. As you compare providers pay attention to the level of customer service that you receive. Is it easy to get ahold of someone when you need help? Are the customer service agents helpful? When you encounter problems you will want a fast and reliable source of fundraising answers, so shop around until you find a fundraising company with a helpful customer service team.

Some school fundraising companies will assign each school a sales agent. This agent will work with your throughout the entire fundraising process and will be there to answer any questions that you may have. If this is important to you, make sure that this is a service that your fundraising company offers.

Product Variety

Choosing a fundraising provider is a lot of work, so you won’t want to do it again the next time you plan a fundraiser. Look for school fundraising providers that offer many different types of fundraisers so that you can work with the same company each time you plan a fundraiser. Try to find a company that offers cookie dough, candy bars and treats, catalog products, magazine sales and more. A large variety of fundraisers will make choosing your next fundraiser much easier.

School fundraising companies take the worry out of school fundraising. These tips will help you to find a great provider that will help you to plan a profitable fundraiser for your school. Don’t be afraid to shop around and compare several different companies until you find the fundraising provider that is right for you.

Why Homeschool? Could There Really Be a Good Reason to Choose This Over Regular School?

In some families, homeschooling starts with the first day of school. The child never sees a regular school at all, even once. Other families try public schools and private schools first, find them completely unsatisfactory and switch to homeschooling after a while. Why homeschool? There can be all kinds of difficulties that parents face in the regular school system – there can be religious differences, there can be learning disabilities that the public school system is unable to provide for, and sometimes, some children just don’t take well to the regimented discipline of school. Some parents believe that they design schools not to help children but for the convenience of the administrative officials. Many parents object deeply to the way the No Child Left Behind act pushes schools so much to do something about the bottom 10% of students in any school, that, with limited resources, the schools have no choice but to take funding away from all the other children to bring the bottom 10% a little bit of help. Parents of children who are able to perform well on their own without too much specialized help, hate to see how their children are being denied the resources they deserve.

Parents who aren’t really familiar with everything that can go wrong with raising a child, often take strong objection to any parent choosing to homeschool their child. Why homeschool, they say, when there is a whole established schooling system that seems to be just about right for everyone else? Consider what happens to a child who has a simple problem – like recurrent migraine. In a strictly scheduled school system, there is always one period after the next, and there is no consideration given to how a child may have a hard time learning when he has a splitting headache. If the migraines are a daily occurrence, they can pretty much be torture for the child. If the public school system would only allow a child to sleep a couple of hours in the middle of the day to help with the migraine, the child could get up and function perfectly, afterwards. But there is no room for that kind of personalized scheduling in a public school or even a private school. The only option left to these parents is to homeschool their child.

The homeschooling method isn’t something that can be dismissed. Many children who routinely struggle at regular school suddenly find their groove when they are moved to homeschooling. Not all children are made the same. Not all children should respond to a standard lesson at a standard class in a standard school. And just consider this last argument for why homeschool can be a tremendous success. Studies today indicate how children in their summer holidays, betray a measurable decline in their IQ. Not having any lessons to learn in their summer vacations, they begin to lose whatever intelligence they gained over the year. With homeschooling, one never has to let a child off his lessons that completely for such an extended period of time.