The flyer should be an invitation to attend your next booster club activity or event. Letting them know your group welcomes them to the school will help increase your parent participation as well as your awareness and set the stage for allowing your senior parents to become mentors instead of distracted leaders. Setup a club table and position yourself so that all parents can easily see you. Isolating a club. This is because it is common for a booster club to stay completely isolated and involve only parent supporters from their given activity or program.
When a booster club realizes that the involvement from parents and supporters outside of their own group can and will provide enhanced help and support they can expand and provide a greater level of support to their activity or program. Tip 1 : By providing opportunities for other groups like the football boosters asking the cheerleaders and band to take an active part in events spaghetti feed, tailgate parties, dances, etc. Tip 2 : Hold open house type events where you invite past club officers, community supporters, alumni, administrators and parents to attend.
An old fashioned barbeque put on for the entire school and paid by the booster club can gain a great deal of support. Seeking local vendors can offset the costs making this a fun and affordable event. Fundraising has become a necessary evil and for many booster clubs a means to insuring the continuation of the activity they support. A continual mistake made by many clubs is running one fundraiser after another or running multiple fundraisers at a time.
This dramatically distracts from the need, the goal and the reason for fundraising. Tip : Doing many fundraisers does not mean raising more money. Doing a few fundraisers over the course of a year and doing them well produces better results.
Keeping your program short 3 weeks max will keep them motivated. Never do more than one fundraiser at a time. Keep the goal in front of everyone, space your fundraisers out so people have down time, this will keep them moving and from burning out as you move closer to your goal. Lack of mission and vision statement. A booster club without a mission or vision statement is kind of like a boat without a rudder.
A common mistake for booster clubs is not taking the time to develop a mission statement. Identifying why the club exists and what its mission is, plays a very important role in helping to attract volunteer support both from the school and the community alike. It also helps provide a club with a road map of what it is trying to achieve. A lack of an Executive Booster Club.
Establishing an executive booster club to help oversee each independent club like football, band and cheerleading will help to increase parent participation, control conflict, help to establish a stronger voice for gathering support and to provide a self serving system for resolving issues.
In addition, the establishment of an executive club will help encourage all parents to become involved, regardless of whether or not their son or daughter are involved in a given activity or program.
Contact each president or leader of each club and ask them to meet with you and the other club leaders for the purpose of helping to position the booster clubs where all can benefit. Getting a school administrator to help promote the idea will expedite the building process. Gaining tax exempt c 3 status. Tip : Although filing for c 3 status is lengthy the benefit is worth the effort.
I recommend a three-step process. First, start by understanding what, legally, is a booster club? Second, look at how similar organizations operate. A school booster club is a group of volunteers, usually parents, who join together to provide support to a school or specific school activity.
The support provided usually includes recruiting volunteers and raising money. Because booster clubs are operated by volunteers, for a nonprofit, charitable purpose, legally booster clubs may be considered nonprofit organizations. Parent Booster USA, the leading organization providing information and support to schools and their booster clubs, suggests that school booster clubs be incorporated in their state as a nonprofit corporation, and registered with the Internal Revenue Service as c 3 public, charitable, tax-exempt organizations.
Loosely defined, a foundation uses their funds to make grants for specific charitable purposes. Similarly, booster clubs raise funds to support specific activities such as sports, band, arts, academic endeavors, or in the case of a PTO Parent Teacher Organization , the entire school.
Foundations typically receive applications from nonprofit groups requesting financial support. The involvement of school booster clubs, in most cases, is limited to raising support money and volunteers and granting it to the school or school program. Booster clubs support what is needed or wanted by coaches. They offer volunteer hours, monetary donations or food for athletes.
Often, they cover some items that may not be covered in the school budget. But then comes the question. What is better — a school with one booster club for all sports or a school with multiple booster clubs so that each sport has its own booster club? There are pros and cons to each scenario, and it really comes down to the culture that the school — and its programs — have embraced. Schools with one booster club have an advantage when it comes to the communication aspect.
The activities director only has to deal with one booster club board and one meeting. The activities director should be the liaison between the booster club and the coach or coaches when necessary. This allows for the coach to focus on the athletes and the program. One booster club works in a manner of raising funds for all athletics. This means there are fewer fundraisers if only one group is doing it. In the one booster club format, funds are divided and all teams are supported as fairly as possible.
The idea of one booster club works well in a small-school setting where involvement is not specialized for the athletes or the parents. One of the disadvantages of one booster club is commitment. If the booster club decides to do a fundraiser to support football, a parent of a child who plays soccer may not be as supportive for that fundraiser.
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