To understand how the CrowdRaiser feature can work for your school, we'll use a case study of a successful school CrowdRaiser. We'll call this school GoodLittle School, a medium sized primary school in a large regional town of families with a predominantly slightly above average income.
To give you a ballpark estimate of what you might expect to raise, we've looked at the donations statistics from GoodLittle School's CrowdRaiser:
- At GoodLittle School 175 children participated from a pool of 420 children.
- Each of the 175 kids had an individual donation page.
- There were 422 donations overall.
- Average value per donation was $38.92.
- Average number of donations per student was 2.5, so the average total value of donations collected per student was $98.30.
- Approximately 50% of kids (95 of them) got one donation for their CrowdRaiser. The average value of this donation was $62.
- Approximately 10% of kids (20 of them) got two donations for their CrowdRaiser. The average value of these donations was $46, for a total value of $92.35.
- 40% of students got three or more donations for their CrowdRaiser.
GoodLittle School made a deliberate decision to target a new audience instead of tapping immediate family. They asked students to ask for donations from people outside their home family unit — grandparents, family friends, colleagues of parents. This meant that the funds raised was all new money raised in addition to other traditional fundraising efforts where they had asked mums and dads and guardians to donate.
The end result was that GoodLittle School managed to raise a whopping $17,200 online plus over $10,000 from the traditional cash "offline" sources. This totalled almost $28,000 for its library, far exceeding their $20,000 target.
While your CrowdRaiser campaign may not reap the same rewards, it's a good reminder that it doesn't take thousands of kids to raise thousands of dollars!
Since we launched the CrowdRaiser feature, we have had many schools use it for their fundraising. Some schools have raised only $1,000, others have raised almost $20,000.
Below is a video of a parent volunteer, outlining the success that their primary school had with the CrowdRaiser feature.
Note: This video was filmed in 2019. Since that time many features have been added to the CrowdRaiser feature for schools.
Note: Schools — private, government, or independent — do not hold Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status, meaning they cannot provide a tax-deductible receipt for general donations. However, building funds (for example, funds raised for the construction of a new library, sports stadium, or other school building) can have DGR status. The first step is to check whether your school has established such a fund and whether this status appears for your school on the Australian Business Register. For more details on how to set up a DGR fund, see the ATO fact sheet on school building funds.