Examples of Successful School Fundraisers

Many achieve extraordinary fundraising results using PledgeStar. Often more than they ever imagined! From fun runs to read-a-thons, each school found a way to get students and parents excited about pitching in. Whether it was a small class project or a big campus-wide event, PledgeStar helped simplify the fundraising process and keep everyone on track. Schools love how they easily share fundraising pages, track real-time progress, and celebrate each donation along the way.

By combining friendly competition, online outreach, and a clear goal, these schools saw both financial success and a boost in school spirit. Parents appreciated the straightforward platform, and students had fun challenging each other to get involved. Teachers were thrilled by the smooth coordination, which saved them valuable time.

We’ve gathered some of our biggest successes here for you to see what’s possible. We hope these real-world examples inspire you to dream big for your own school fundraiser!

• Gilchrist Elementary, a Tallahassee, Florida school, used PledgeStar and their help with the event. Their goal was to raise $85,000, and they ended up with about $95,000.

• From 1.9 Million Minutes read to $120K gathered: PledgeStar Elevated Mateo-Foster City School District Education Foundation’s Fundraiser

• How St. Francis de Sales Raised Over 10x Their Goal with PledgeStar: A Walk-a-Thon Success Story

• Anderson School in Bozeman, Montana, raised about $50,000 both years it used PledgeStar, compared to about $30,000 before.

• Mission Viejo Christian Church reached its goal of $60,000 easily and even has $16,000 in reserves for next year thanks to PledgeStar

• Pine Creek Elementary PTO Raised $55,000 with PledgeStar for an Unforgettable "Day of Fun" Fundraiser!

And these are just a few of PledgeStar’s success stories. Feel free to browse more of those successes to find inspiration and motivation for your next fundraiser.

You asked... We listened!

Based on your valuable feedback, we've made some exciting updates at Pledgestar. These include key features designed to enhance the experience for teachers, administrators, and the entire school community. At Pledgestar, our mission is to simplify fundraising and engagement. These updates reflect our commitment to innovation and user satisfaction.

Teacher Portal: Empowering Educators

Our new Teacher Portal provides teachers with access to:

• Monitor Student Progress
• Generate Detailed Reports
• Allow access to Student Reading Logs
• Track classroom participation
• See classroom totals

Participation Tracking: A Vital Insight for Administrators

To ensure you have the tools needed to boost class participation, we've introduced a Teacher Participation Report. This new report tracks student engagement, detailing, involvement and participation percentages. By highlighting participation levels, educators can identify areas for improvement and celebrate successes, fostering a more interactive and dynamic learning environment.

Maximize Your Fundraising: Allow Donors to cover more of your costs!

When setting up your event, you can give donors the choice to cover associated fees using a percentage that you set. Many schools choose 10% to cover all PledgeStar and credit card fees yielding all of the intended donation. It's a simple change that can significantly increase the overall funds raised, maximizing the impact of every dollar contributed.

How does the fee coverage option work with the fee cap? As you may know, unlike other services, Pledgestar only charges 7% of online donations with a cap of $1195. The fee cap means that, as you raise more, the percentage of fundraising earnings that you keep increases. When you allow donors to opt in and cover the fees, you get to use that fee coverage money for other event expenses once you hit the cap making PledgeStar FREE and your event expenses minimized! This enables groups to keep the intended donations for the causes that really matter.

Additional Leaderboards: Inspiring Friendly Competition

While we have always offered a leaderboard, we're excited to now provide the option to add two leaderboards with more choices, adding an extra element of fun and motivation. These dynamic displays track and showcase metrics like:

• Money Raised
• Minutes Read
• Pledge Count
• Average Pledge Amount
• Average Pledge Count
• Average Minutes Read

Leaderboards create a sense of community and healthy competition, encouraging students to push themselves and their peers to achieve and exceed their targets.

These are just a few of our newest features that work with PledgeStar's already robust range of customizable features. This is what continues to make PledgeStar the best event fundraising platform in the business. Thank you for being a part of the Pledgestar community. Together, we're making a difference in education, one pledge at a time.

PledgeStar always helped raise more with less work than any other online fundraising system, and three new features take it to the next level:

• Donation Matching
• The PledgeStar App
• Fee Coverage Option

Rachel del Monte with Ulloa Elementary in San Francisco raves about PledgeStar’s donation matching feature. “Our families were thrilled with how easy PledgeStar makes corporate matching gifts count toward their children's goals,” she says. “Sometimes large companies take three months to process matching gifts, but with PledgeStar, it counts right away.” “Donation matching increased our fundraising 10%!”.

“PledgeStar's new mobile app helped make our fundraiser successful,” says Ann Gomez of Bradshaw Christian School. “The ability to easily email or text donation requests right from your phone's address book is really attractive to younger generations. With the rapid embrace of smartphones and apps, there is a generation of parents at our school that are used to doing things this way.” It was a long-overdue shift according to Ms. Gomez. “It really speaks their language.”

Finally, PledgeStar’s fee coverage option lets donors cover credit card and platform fees. Alia Hedges, from Cooper Mountain Elementary’s PTA, explained that this feature convinced her school to use PledgeStar. “We used PledgeStar’s Fee Coverage feature that lets donors elect to cover credit card and platform fees. It was amazing. It’s hard to give up any money during a fundraiser, and the donations we raised this year covered 100% of the fees.”

Each year PledgeStar finds new ways to help raise more and work less.

So what are you waiting for? Contact PledgeStar today to start your most successful fundraiser.

For the past 8 years The PledgeStar Online Fundraising System has helped schools, sports teams, and youth groups make the transition away from door-to-door fundraising and product sales to online fundraising which is easy, efficient, and saves money. Families and participants can sign up online, send out pledge requests, and start collecting donations in less than 15 minutes! Whether you are new to online fundraising or just shaking the dust off after a long lock down, here's a few features PledgeStar recently added to its already extensive list to help make your next fundraiser the best one yet:

• Translate Feature: Allow families and donors to translate their pages and letters to over 50 different languages.
• Custom donor letters: Allow your participants to write their own donation request to their family and friends or use the standard template.
• Cover Fundraising Fees: Donors can elect to cover the credit card fees or any other associated fundraising fees to allow you to keep more of the intended donation.
• Accept PayPal Payments: Allow donors to make a donation by paying with their PayPal account.
• Custom reports: Easily identify and track any data you need to help run your fundraiser. Track online and offline pledges, prizes, repetitions, etc. in easily filterable and sortable tables, all right in your browser without any need for another program.
• Prize List: List your prizes on the site so participants always know what they are striving for.
• New Themes: Even more options to pick from to match the look of your fundraiser.
• Participant Logs: If you are having a Read A Thon, Exercise-A-Thon, or any other event where participants need to record their activities, you may activate your participant logs so students can record their activities online.
• Event Goals: This will create an event goal meter so your families can track the fundraisers progress.
• Leaderboard: A group leaderboard that allows parents and participants to track how their group is doing.
• Prize Money Cut Off Date: Allows you to keep accepting donations but lets your families and donors know the last day donations will be counted toward prizes.
• Event Video: Do you have a video you would like to share with your donors? A video can be added to the donor email and donor page.

For a list of more features click here. If you are looking for a specific feature that you don’t see or have any other questions please reach out to our fundraising team at info@pledgestar.com or (949) 215-4458.

For the past 7 years The PledgeStar Online Fundraising System has helped schools, sports teams, and youth groups make the transition away from door-to-door fundraising and product sales easy, efficient, and money saving. Now, with schools and other activities starting back up under stricter guidelines this fall, the ability to fundraise from the comfort of home is more crucial than ever. Families and participants can sign up online, send out pledge requests, and start collecting donations in less than 15 minutes! Whether you are new to online fundraising or just shaking the dust off after a long lock down, here's a few features PledgeStar recently added to its already extensive list to help make your next fundraiser the best one yet:

• Translate Feature: Allow families and donors to translate their pages and letters to over 50 different languages.
• Custom donor letters: Allow your participants to write their own donation request to their family and friends or use the standard template.
• Cover Fundraising Fees: Donors can elect to cover the credit card fees or other associated fundraising fees to allow you to keep more of the intended donation.
• Accept PayPal Payments: Allow donors to make a donation by paying with their PayPal account.
• Custom reports: Easily identify and track any data you need to help run your fundraiser. Track online and offline pledges, prizes, repetitions, etc. in easily filterable and sortable tables, all right in your browser without any need for another program.
• Prize List: List your prizes on the site so participants always know what they are striving for.
• New Themes: Even more options to pick from to match the look of your fundraiser.
• Participant Logs: If you are having a Read A Thon, Exercise-A-Thon, or any other event where participants need to record their activities, you may activate your participant logs so students can record their activities online.
• Event Goals: This will create an event goal meter so your families can track the fundraisers progress.
• Leaderboard: A group leaderboard that allows parents and participants to track how their group is doing.

For a list of more features click here. If you are looking for a specific feature that you don’t see or have any other questions please reach out to our fundraising team at info@pledgestar.com or (949) 215-4458.

As another school year draws to a close, we look back on a record-breaking year, and forward to new features designed to make your 2018-19 school-year fundraiser your best one yet!

This year, we helped schools and other youth organizations raise more than $20 million, with kids raising an average of $140 each. PledgeStar’s automated pledge request system helped kids solicit donations from over 1.2 million family and friends around the world.

Best of all, PledgeStar customers retained an average of 95% of what they raised, thanks to our high fundraising totals and low fee cap.

And we plan to break even more records next year with new features to help you work less and raise more:

• Text message pledge requests allow participants to reach more family and friends resulting in a 15% fundraising increase.
• Online email address book importing makes it even faster and easier to solicit family and friends.
• T-shirt size collection during registration reduces event administrator headaches when ordering event t-shirts.
• Participant reading log entry simplifies per hour (or per page) pledge calculations.
• Administrators may add an option for donors to contribute a little extra to help offset event costs.
• Improved donation reporting details donation counts and amounts originating from email, text message, and social media pledge requests, so you can see which works best for you.
• View the prize report by student, or grouped by teacher or grade.

Our goal is to make the next fundraiser your best one yet. Congratulations to all our customers who worked less and raised more this past year.

If you think you'd like to have a pledge drive as your school or group fundraiser, you might need to get board approval before proceeding. Here are a few recommendations to help you get your board on board:

• First, read through this guide. If you have any unanswered questions, feel free to call PledgeStar at (949) 215-4458. We're happy to help! And, since we have worked so many fundraiser’s with so many schools, we probably have the answer you’re looking for.
• Next, find someone you trust to lead the fundraiser, and gain their support. It's a lot easier to get the board to agree to start a pledge drive once someone has volunteered to lead the project.
• Get your group's opinion leaders (President, VP, Treasurer and Fundraising Chairperson) excited about the idea. Send them a copy of "Pledge Drives Made Easy" to help explain the benefits. Need a copy of our ebook? It’s on our website or email us at INFO@PLEDGESTAR.COM and we will send you back a copy!
• At the beginning, you may encounter concerns or objections from some of your group's members. Hopefully, you will be able to overcome any problems using the information in our ebook. However, if a member raises a concern or objection you don't know how to respond to, you can call PledgeStar at (949) 215- 4458, and we will give you recommendations to help address the issue. Our lines are open seven days a week from 7 AM until 8 PM. We look forward to working with you!

What is a pledge drive?

A pledge drive is a fundraiser where your students ask for donations from family and friends to help fund programs and equipment that enrich their education. A pledge drive can be an event like a Jog-A-Thon or Walk-A-Thon, but it can also be a Read A Thon or Donation Drive that doesn't occur on a specific date.

Why host a pledge drive?

Pledge drives are the easiest way for schools to raise big money. Unlike product sales, they don't require your students to sell and distribute products, and your school can keep every dollar raised.

How much money do pledge drives raise?

Kids raise an average of $175 each. Students using PledgeStar generally raise twice as much as those who don't.

How does PledgeStar help raise twice as much?

Grandparents, aunts, uncles and close friends would happily donate if asked, but many parents feel uncomfortable soliciting them. This deprives your school of thousands in donations. PledgeStar solves this problem by making it fun and easy to ask. Parents simply enter family and friends' names and email addresses or text message numbers, then PledgeStar sends pledge requests from the children that are so cute and effective, over half result in donations. Parents can even post the pledge requests on social media. PledgeStar also streamlines the process with secure, online donations that go directly into the school's account.