School Fundraiser: Spend Your Way to Profits
Here's another idea just added to our list of free fundraising ideas. This is considered free, even though you and, hopefully, lots of your supporters need to spend money in order to make it work.
If you open a personal or business checking account (both of which are free) with Washington Mutual, they will give you a debit card (also free) with which you can buy things and pay your bills. This entitles you to enroll in their school fundraising program, which they call WaMoola for Schools.
After enrolling, when you use your debit card for any purchases or payments, you accumulate "points", which then translate into dollars for the school. Each transaction (excluding ATM transactions) earns one point and each point is worth five cents. At the end of the year, if the school accumulates $50 dollars or more, the bank donates the equivalent dollar amount.
If the school does not accumulate at least $50 dollars by the end of the year, the donations will be allocated to organizations supporting education.
Your school of choice has to be an IRS recognized tax-exempt school (which is most of them). You can view a list of schools on the WaMoola for Schools site.
Fundraising doesn't get any easier than this. Imagine how much money your school will get over the course of a couple of years if every student's family uses a card like this for all of their shopping and bill paying. Naturally, the more people who sign up for this fundraiser and choose your school, the more money your school gets.
At five cents per transaction, this won't raise a lot of money quickly like some fundraisers. Rather, it's the way of the tortoise – slow and steady. But, like magazine fundraising and t-shirt fundraising, if you're trying to raise money or your school, you'd be foolish not to do this one anyway just because it's free and requires very little effort.
It's kind of ironic really. It's for schools and yet it's a no-brainer.
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