PTA and PTO Fundraising Ideas

Google “PTA and PTO Fundraising Ideas” and you get the usual suggestions… car washes, selling chocolate bars, selling magazine subscriptions, etc. All of these ideas, and more, should be part of your fundraising efforts. Branded merchandise sales (customized with your full color school mascot) are also a great source of revenue. Some examples of branded merchandise are

• Custom Car Magnets from ARC Marketing (we’re biased)
• Custom T-Shirts from a local screen printer
• Custom Decals from ARC Marketing (we offer these also)
• Custom Baseball Caps from a local screen printer

These customized goodies, printed with your school mascot, tend to be very popular as fundraising items and your school can make some serious money selling them to parents, faculty, local business leaders, and the population at large. An additional benefit to raising money is that they provide a little bit of advertising, or “awareness”. As more and more of these items start appearing around your community, your school gets more and more recognition.

T-shirts and baseball caps can generate quite a bit of exposure, but these items tend to only be worn on weekends (unless your work’s Casual Friday allows for this type of attire!). And then after a few months, the T-shirt ends up in the rag-basket and is only used to wax the car.

Car magnets on the other hand, provide exposure every time your car is on the road. Can you guess how many other cars will see your car magnet on a daily basis? Of course this is hard to measure, but conservative estimates are a minimum of 100 cars daily (this would be for a very small community) to more than a thousand cars each day (easy to achieve in large markets like Southern California).

Car magnets also can provide a larger profit margin than T-shirts and caps. First, always use a high quality T-shirt (you should only use the best T-shirts from known suppliers such as Hanes, Gildan, etc.), otherwise you are going to need to handle a lot of quality complaints beginning a few weeks after the fundraiser. Doing a quick internet search for pricing, I have found that several of the larger on-line custom T-shirt companies will charge you about $13.50 per shirt (with a one color front logo and a full color larger logo on the back) for 250 shirts in various sizes. How much do you think you could sell each T-shirt for? Would you pay $25 for a T-shirt? Probably not. $20? Maybe. $15? You’re getting warmer, but a $15 each, you are only making about a buck and a half per shirt. Plus, you’ll be shelling out $3,375 up front for those shirts. Sounds like a lot of risk for only $375 profit (at a $15 sales price).

On the other hand, 250 fully customized car magnets from ARC Marketing will only cost $2.00 each (fully customized with your team logo) and you can sell them $6 to $10 each. Let’s assume that your parents and faculty are very involved with supporting your school and you sell them for $10 each. Doing some quick math, I come up with the following… you’ll be shelling out about $500 for 250 custom magnets and at $10 each, you’ll be pulling in $2,500. That’s about $2,000 in profit. This makes selling T-Shirts seem like an exercise in futility.

Again, we’re not saying not to use T-Shirts and candy fundraisers. We’re just saying you can make a lot more money with a lot less work and risk with custom car magnets from ARC Marketing.

Getting started on your magnets is easy, and we’ll do all of the design-work for free. To begin on your free design, just visit our website and give us a little info about your school. One of our artists will design your car magnet pronto and email it back to you. Click here to get started!