Mobilize Your Troops! Inkjet Fundraising
by Lam
(Monterey Park, CA, USA)
My high school is in Alhambra, CA. If you watched the 2009 Rose Parade in Pasadena, you would have seen them marching with the Alhambra All-City Band.
I was the president of the marching and concert bands, and our music department is (always) in need of money.
Fundraising for new instruments, the spring tour, taking uniforms to the dry cleaners, new sheet music were only some of the things we needed to constantly be raising money for.
I had seen other places doing inkjet recycling, so I looked into it.
I found that the majority of our school used a brand that brought in quite a chunk of change, considering the cartridges would just be thrown away otherwise.
The company I contacted sent us all of the material we needed to pack and send used cartridges to them free of charge.
I mobilized the band. We divided the school using floorplans and I split the kids into groups. Each group took on a certain number of classrooms, giving a stump speech about our fundraising.
We then left labeled boxes behind in each classroom for students to leave their cartridges.
We followed up by checking on the boxes every week, and reminding the teachers to remind their students. The band members were pretty motivated -- every dollar that is not fundraised for the spring trip must be paid out of pocket.
I think it was pretty successful. Try it out for your school organization!