Step by Step How to Guide
How to Build a Fundraising Business inside your Travel Ball Team
When you started your competitive club or travel squad, Did you know how much fundraising you needed to do to participate in everything you wanted to?
If you are like me, I was shocked when I saw what the total budget was going to be for the team, and each family. Woah! We needed a plan and quick!
Let me take you back to the start of our Travel Baseball Team, and how we created an evergreen fundraising program that funded our team and its $15,000/year budget for 5 straight years.
We started off like everyone does, selling anything and everything we could. Peanuts and Rolls from Texas Roadhouse, wrapping paper, candy bars, and butter braids. We were asking for sponsorships, donations, etc. as well. How exhausting!
One day a softball coach friend of mine came up to me and asked if I had ever done the laundry detergent fundraiser? I said, “What!” “A Laundry detergent fundraiser”? What will they come up with next, I thought to myself. I decided, It was definitely unique enough, and my parents were all for giving it a shot, so we did.
We did fairly well on our first sale, and made a few grand for the team. What was really amazing is what happened 3 months later. I hear the phone ring. It was one of my parents calling, I answer, “ Hey, I have a couple of people asking if we are going to sell the laundry detergent again, they were about out and LOVED it.” A couple of days later, another parent calls asking the same thing. People really seem to respond to this fundraiser. So we decided to do the fundraiser again. We had an even better sale than the time before, nearly doubling or order and profit. We had some service issues on both orders that were bad enough to cause alot of stress and potentially lose customers over so we decided to look for another vendor. We had virtually no luck finding someone else that was offering this fundraiser, so the team mom and I decided we would start our own laundry detergent fundraising company. It started as a way for our parents to make more profit and we could share with the other teams that we played against and we can just see where this goes.
4 months later we were starting another round of laundry detergent fundraising. This time we were Sudz Fundraising doing it the first time for ourselves. The other major change was the biggest one even though it is so basic and so subtle.
We added space on the order form for email address and cell phone. This way when we were going to start selling again we could let everyone know that bought last time and see if they wanted to re-order. We also encouraged them to share this with family members and friends that may be interested and we added them to our mailing list. To make a long story short we repeated this cycle for the better part of 5 years before the kids all transitioned into High School Baseball and would be on their school teams playing against each other.
Below I have broken down all of the simple steps to start this same “fundraiser business” in your town. The best part is….. YOU can earn an income as the team leader or coach, or donate the extra profit you make to the team. If you have ever wanted a side hustle or an additional income stream from doing what you are already doing with your spare time, this is it!
STEPS TO START YOUR OWN FUNDRAISING BUSINESS for YOUR TRAVEL TEAM
Step 1:
Discuss the idea of doing this fundraiser 3-4 times per year with your parents. They are the ones that will be selling, delivering, collecting money, etc. If they arent into it, then you may want to think twice about doing this 3-4 times per year. The average family buys will run out of the 5 gallons every 3-4 months.
Step 2:
Decide how you are going to disperse the profit your team makes. Does some of the profit come off of the top for the team? How does the profit get distributed to their fees? Can they sell over the required amounts and apply that to travel or equipment expenses?
We created sub accounts for each of our parents, and every fundraiser we would add their profit to their subaccount. We also allowed for the money they raised over and above the team fees to be rolled over from year to year, applied to travel or equipment expenses the family incurred. We tracked everything for everyone’s expenses in a Free app called Teamsnap , that also allowed you to manage schedules, group communication, etc.
Step 3:
Sign up for a Mailchimp account. Mailchimp allows you to add your customers from the fundraiser into a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) that allows you to add each customer to your list and the next time you sell the system will automate email and text message services that will send the messages to your customers reminding them you will be selling again. When you have a product that provides as much value to the customer as the laundry detergent fundraiser soap does, service is the next big key to earning a customer for life.
Having a system that organizes, communicates, and manages all of the customer relationships you are building was imperative for our success in building our little local laundry detergent fundraising business.
Step 4:
The next step is getting the word out to everyone! Marketing is your next best friend. People need to know that you are selling it and what kind of value it is to them and or your team. One of my favorite tools for this is CANVA. Canva is a non-designers best friend. It has beautiful templates that you can just drag and drop edit into your own team name and color scheme. You can use this for all of your flyers, communication with your team, sponsor letters, order forms, etc. Mailchimp can also come into play here where you can add a form onto your website or Facebook page that allows people to signup if interested. You can send messaging to them in a different campaign than the previous customers where you direct them about the features and benefits of using our detergent, making the team profit, and saving them money at the store.
(If you decide to join our program, we provide you with Sudz marketing material that we customize into your team branding.)
Step 5:
Plan of Attack.
There are 2 ways to attack this program. The first is mainly for the coach that wants to make a side income from this, and introduce it to other teams they compete against, local high school teams, etc. They will be marketing to the entire community and showing other teams how to do what they are doing.
The second is a coach that wants to solely build their local business for their team. Each round using mailchimp and social media to attract more customers to your team’s sale every 3-4 months.
There are multiple ways of putting it together and getting it started. Our fundraising coach staff will help you every step of the way if you want to walk into a done for you, ready to go business in a box.
If you are interested please book a call with our C.E.O. HERE
