Fundraising Ideas That Actually Work
Playbooks and strategy written for coaches, athletic directors, and booster volunteers. No cookie dough, no door-to-door, no 30% vendor cut — just plans you can run this season, free.
10 Team Fundraising Ideas That Don't Involve Selling Anything
Cookie dough, discount cards, and wrapping paper burn out your athletes and your community. Ten fundraisers built on direct giving instead of door-to-door sales.
Read the playbook →The Donation Calendar: The Fundraiser Your Community Fills In
How a calendar fundraiser works, the pricing math behind it, and why watching the month fill up outperforms almost any product sale.
Read the playbook →Fill the Jersey: How a Claim-Grid Fundraiser Works
A jersey-shaped grid of priced squares that supporters claim until the picture is complete. The mechanics, the math, and how to run one at a home game.
Read the playbook →The Team Donation Day Playbook (With Copy-Paste Text Scripts)
One coordinated day where every athlete sends 10 personal asks. The schedule, the scripts, and the leaderboard mechanics that make it work.
Read the playbook →How to Get Local Businesses to Sponsor Your Team (Ask Templates Included)
A tiered sponsorship structure, the email that gets meetings, and the deliverables businesses actually want from a school team.
Read the playbook →How Much Should Your Team Try to Raise? The Real Math
Work backward from your actual budget gap, then sanity-check against your roster size and community. Includes the per-athlete math most teams skip.
Read the playbook →The Car Wash Problem: Rank Your Fundraisers by Dollars per Hour
The one metric that exposes which fundraisers are worth running: total raised divided by total person-hours. Run this math before you book the parking lot.
Read the playbook →The 4-Week Season Kickoff Fundraiser Plan
A week-by-week plan to run your entire season's fundraising in the first month — so the rest of the season is about the sport.
Read the playbook →The Oregon Booster Club Compliance Guide
Everything an Oregon booster club must file to exist legally — IRS status, the 3-year auto-revocation trap, DOJ registration, raffle licensing — with real costs and primary sources.
Read the playbook →The Fundraising Rule That Cost a Booster Club Its Tax Status
Crediting fundraising proceeds to individual athletes' accounts feels fair — and it's the exact practice the IRS calls private benefit. What Capital Gymnastics teaches every booster club.
Read the playbook →The Booster Treasurer's Toolkit: Controls, Tools, and What They Cost
The money-handling rules auditors actually look for, plus the concrete toolkit — free bookkeeping, nonprofit bank accounts, $50-a-year insurance — with current prices.
Read the playbook →Get one fundraising idea in your inbox each week
Practical, field-tested, free. Written for coaches, ADs, and booster volunteers — never spam, never ads.
Ready to run one of these with software built for it? Start your fundraiser →