Fundraising 101

My Escojo group has been working on fundraising so the group will have money. We have a lot of things coming up in the month of May that we need to pay for. The Escojo group from the neighboring town of La Capilla is coming to give us a lecture on discrimination and then the two groups are going to compete in a scavenger hunt, so it is our responsibility to buy snacks for the meeting. We also have our big graduation party coming up at the end of May, so the group needs money to buy a cake, refreshments, and graduation certificates. Thirdly, we’re planning on going to Matancitas, a town about an hour away, to visit the Escojo group there, so we need to pay for the transportation of the group. AND the group wants t-shirts made so that we can all look cool.

The group does not know that I have applied for a $16,000 peso grant (about $500 US dollars) to use for the Escojo group. I refuse to tell them until absolutely necessary because they need to learn how to raise the funds themselves. Once I leave, they aren’t going to be able to get grants from the US government, so they need to learn how they can raise money.

So in the regional Escojo conference, Andy and Meri learned how to make bracelets out of string and beads. We decided that a fun and simple fundraiser would be to make the bracelets and sell them to the students in the school. So I went to Nagua, bought $1000 pesos worth of materials, and spent 1 hour teaching the 20 kids in the group how to make them. Everyone made 3 or 4 bracelets and left the meeting excited to sell them. In larger towns, Escojo groups are selling the same bracelets for $40 pesos, so we decided since Baoba is a smaller, more rural campo, we were going to sell them for $35.

A week passed, and at our weekly Escojo meeting, I asked everyone to pass forward the money they got from selling the bracelets. The grand total of our fundraising efforts: $50 pesos or less than $2 US dollars. I was hoping that we would make enough money for me to make my $1000 and then the rest would be the group’s profits. But as the results were a little less than expected, I decided I would be fine with losing my $1000 pesos and all of the money that the group got from selling the bracelets would be their profits. Because I was angry and disappointed, I then turned my normal sex-ed class into a basic business lesson and led a discussion into what went wrong with selling the bracelets. The lessons learned?

• Our price of 35 pesos was too high, and we would’ve sold more if the price was at 25 pesos.
• We cannot sell the bracelets on credit, especially to little kids. They will never pay the money owed.
• We cannot teach the kids how to make the bracelets themselves because then they will make their own bracelets and won’t buy them from us.
• If we sell a bracelet, we cannot spend the money on snacks or other things sold in the school. This completely defeats the purpose of group fundraising and is in fact like stealing money for the group.

I then asked the group how we could solve the problem. The group from La Capilla arrives in Baoba in one week and we only have 50 pesos to use to buy snacks for the meeting. So the group decided that everyone will bring 50 pesos to the next meeting. So now the group has a little bit of money, yet they still have absolutely no idea how to fundraise.