Friday, June 5, 2009

Online Fundraising For Your School

By Michael Kerin

Is your school actively raising funds online? While traditional fundraising methods continue to support schools, one online fundraising program brings donations from many vendors without much effort from your school. It also comes with a terrific website.

The Paperless PTO is a web hosting provider that specializes in eco-friendly, fundraising websites for parent teacher organizations. The website your PTO will receive is loaded with features that will result in a significant reduction in the amount of time it takes to organize your events and they will simultaneously guide your organization on how to become more efficient and environmentally correct.

There is much more to it than the basic tasks any PTO website should perform. Included are routines which help PTOs in managing membership databases, sending email announcements to one or many groups of families in any school, managing an online calendar, archiving flyers and meeting minutes and more. The ability to accept credit card payments is even an option.

Perhaps the most attention grabbing part of the program is that The Paperless PTO staff runs the online fundraising program for its subscribers. PTOs are overjoyed to learn how they can raise funds from internet marketing without having to put much effort into it. They simply need to make the most of the website since the more families that use it the more the PTO benefits.

As a Paperless PTO website evolves, its main features immediately become the core point of communication between the board members and their families. The fundraising feature is centered around an online mall that is part of the program. When the PTOs families begin using the mall, the participating merchants send donations back to the PTO for the traffic sent to their sites.

For those families that already shop online, this becomes a simple adjustment that will benefit your PTO from the purchases that they regularly make. For those families who may be new to the concept, it presents a new method of fundraising that is of no additional cost to anyone.

When you crunch the numbers you can quickly gather how lucrative the online fundraising can be for each PTO. The average school with 300 families will be supported by those families for periods up to ten years and more. Families with more than one student who are several years apart will be supporting the school for an even greater period. The more the PTO uses the website, the more often the family members visit each month and the more often they support the PTO.

Repetition and familiarity are key ingredients in any kind of successful campaign. Once you make the most out of a website that saves your PTO time, makes your PTO money and contributes to the longevity of our environment everyone wins.

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