This is the second part in our New Year’s Resolution for Organizations series! If you missed part one – which talked about membership recruitment efforts – check it out here!
Once you’ve recruited a bunch of new and enthusiastic members who are ready to hit the ground running, you’ll probably be ready to focus on your next goal – raising more money for your organization, or hosting more events. If you’re looking for some unique – and fun – fundraising ideas, check out this post!
The issue that many organizations face at the beginning of their “season” is that while they’re eager to host fundraisers and reach their goals, there’s so much paperwork and management that needs to go into the process. After all, the events aren’t going to plan themselves, the money raised won’t walk itself to the bank, and the donors won’t just magically receive a receipt… or will they?
If you’re planning an event that may run for a few hours, offer to allow your members to participate in shifts. It’s much more likely that someone can (and is willing to) contribute two or three hours at a time rather than five or six on a Saturday or Sunday. But – with shift scheduling comes sign-up sheets. Let Pay4SchoolStuff.com manage that for you – simply set up the forms in our system and have your members log in to fill in their timeslots.
So you’ve got your scheduled workers – now what? Well, the next step is pretty obvious – start collecting those funds and donation forms! Rather than handing out paper forms to every person that’s interested in donating, and then having to handwrite a receipt (not to mention keeping track of the cash!), use Pay4SchoolStuff.com to process their donations/payment, and instantly provide them with an electronic receipt that they can file away. Bonus: You won’t need to worry about making someone on your team responsible for getting the money to the bank – the electronic funds transfer feature will automatically move the collected funds into your organization’s bank account via a secure transaction.
Well, what if someone wants to make a cash donation – not an electronic donation? That’s fine too! At the event itself you can have a computer set up for the donor to create an account and “purchase” a zero-cost item. In the memo line of the “zero-cost item” purchase a member of your team can record their contribution amount and they’ll still be able to have an electronic record of their “purchase.”
And now that you’ve organized everything more efficiently and increased your volunteer involvement and fundraising it’s time to keep track of all information, transactions and forms. You could, of course, keep a handwritten ledger or electronic spreadsheet that you need to manually update but we’ve got a better solution. Through the Reporting Function on Pay4SchoolStuff.com you can customize report criteria by date, item, parent, student, or payments, and even pull up a full contact report for all account holders. And you can e-mail any (or all) of those involved with the click of a button.
If one of the goals of your organization for the New Year and beyond is to manage your business affairs more efficiently let Pay4SchoolStuff help you. There’s more to running an organization than just processing payments online!
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