Alicia Burke sells tickets to Mimi Williams at the Sunday’s Holy Family Catholic School Fun Fest in Rockford. (Photo by Lynne Conner / For Chronicle Media)

The cool, crisp breeze, apple cider, brilliantly colored leaves and all things pumpkin spice are the usual heralds of autumn.

Add to this list, ringing doorbells and eager, youngsters ready to make a sale and you have entered the fall fundraising season.

With the school year well underway and students returning to extracurricular activities; many parents are faced with managing their children(s) fundraising efforts on top of supervising homework, sports, scouts and clubs.

It’s not unusual for the Woloszyn family of Rockford to be involved with multiple fundraisers at one time. The six Woloszyn boys have raised funds for scouting and sports in addition to participating in regular school fundraisers. Their mom, Susan and dad, John, try to make the experience fun, fair and safe for all their children.

“Right now, we have two fundraisers going on, just for Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts which are the wreath sales and popcorn sales. I know that schools will be starting with their fundraisers soon; and since we have four boys in one school, figuring out how to divide up the sales between each kid is hard. We want it to be fair,” she said.

Susan says that the boys are pretty motivated to sell their products but finding creative ways to reach out to neighbors and friends is difficult.

“Finding the time to go out and do the sales door-to-door and making phone calls to family is hard. Sometimes, I will take a picture of what the boys are selling and post it to Facebook and then more people are aware of the fundraiser and will respond to my post if they are interested.”

Safety is a main concern for Susan when her boys are doing fundraisers.

“You don’t want to send your kids out alone, door-to-door, but sometimes it’s hard to find a time when either John or I am available to go out selling with the kids,” she said.
Due to safety concerns about children out fundraising unattended, many parents will circulate order forms at their workplace as a way to boost sales.

“John is not really allowed to do fundraising at work,” Susan said, “but I am on Facebook with many of his co-workers, so they can always message me, if they’re interested.”

A rule of thumb when selling door-to-door for a fundraiser is always stick to the homes of friends and families. (Photo by Lynne Conner / for Chronice Media)

Susan adds that sometimes she will have her college-age son chaperone her younger boys when they are out in their neighborhood.

Setting goals, helping worthwhile groups and learning how to relate to adults are all positive aspects of having her sons participate in fundraisers.

“The kids will set goals on how much product they want to sell. With the Boy Scout fundraisers … the focus is on earning money for scouting trips instead of earning prizes,” Susan said.

“Fundraising also teaches kids manners. We always make sure to say, ‘Thank you’ even if somebody doesn’t end up buying anything,” she said. “Fundraising teaches kids how to present themselves to others and not be so shy around adults. It’s almost like a little speech with an introduction, an explanation of the product and the conclusion with either a sale or a ‘not this time’ which teaches kids how to handle rejection.”

In her opinion, the ingredients of a worthwhile fundraiser include offering quality products and seeing the funds raised put to good use.

“It’s much better when the products the kids are selling are worth it,” Susan said. “Items that you can eat usually make good fundraisers. If items are reasonably priced, that’s a positive … if you are not being taken advantage of but your group still makes money, that’s great. I also prefer fundraisers that are not all about prizes, because then the group, or school or sport gets more of the profits,” Susan said. “The younger kids don’t realize how much product you need to sell in order to get one of the big prizes and the older the kids get, the less they care about prizes anyway.”

With more than 12 years of experience as an elementary administrator, Corine Gendron, principal at Holy Family Catholic School in Rockford, has seen first-hand the good sides and the bad sides of school fundraisers.

She says that the first step in a successful fundraiser is to communicate with the school population to determine interest and goals.

“A good fundraiser really needs to be tailored to the school culture, the climate, the population of school families. What works in one school and appeals to one set of families may not work with others,” she said.

Gendron explains, “Having a golf outing might work at one school if there are a lot of parents that play golf. At another school, where there is not an interest in golf, a golf play day would fall flat. It really depends on what you can get your families excited about and interested in.”

In general, many Catholic schools in the Rockford area have two fundraisers each year, one event fundraiser and one product sale fundraiser.

“One fundraiser that has been most successful across the board … is the Race for Education/spirit walk or a walk-a-thon event,” Gendron said. A lot of the schools that have done this for quite a few years found it to be a great fundraiser … However, and you see this with every fundraiser, after you’ve done a Race for Education type of event for a few years, the excitement wears off and sometimes it needs to be changed up. Across the board, though, this seems to be the most successful fundraiser that works in different school settings.”

Gendron also has seen volunteer burnout take its toll on the small group of parents who typically organize event-type fundraisers. The hope is that with new families coming into a school each year, the parent volunteer pool will increase and the torch can be passed to others.

“Here at Holy Family, the Fall Fest is one of the biggest fundraisers for the school, but this event is fairly new … I’m excited because this will be my first one,” she said.

This year’s Holy Family Fall Fest was Sunday, Sept. 25 and featured food, games, prizes, kids’ activities a raffle and a silent gift basket auction.

Schools and organizations wanting to do a product sale fundraiser have found success selling World’s Finest Chocolate products. Both Gendron and Susan Woloszyn agree, “World’s Finest Chocolate is always a popular fundraiser,” Gendron said. “It’s easy to sell, people are familiar with the product and it’s a good profit maker. The area rep for World’s Finest Chocolate is very easy to work with which helps the success of the sale.”

“Selling World’s Finest Chocolate products is pretty easy for kids because the candy bars are only a dollar apiece and most everyone has a dollar on them,” Susan said. “We’ve even had times where people didn’t buy the candy bars, but gave my boys a $5 donation and told them to have a candy bar for themselves. Of course, my kids think that’s the best sale!”

One of the biggest concerns schools and organizations have about fundraising is making sure that all the money and products are accounted for at the end of the sale or event.

According to Gendron, Catholic schools in the Diocese of Rockford have cash handling policies in place that all school groups and teams are required to follow.

“There always has to be two people counting any money raised from a sale or event,” she said. “The money from a product sale or fundraising event always stays at the school or parish where it can be locked up. During a fun-fair event for example, I went with a Home and School rep every hour to collect money from each booth that had a cashbox so we could lock up the money as the event progressed.”

Gendron also said that multiple people count fundraising money at one time to double and triple check the amounts taken in. The amounts are then recorded and a paper trail ensures accountability on everyone’s part.

“Most Home and School organizations are required to run their budgets, their deposits and their expenditures through the parish accounting process,” Gendron said.

She also acknowledged that office personnel in the school, the parish business manager, the Home and School treasurer, teachers and coaches all must pass background checks before they can work with children or handle fundraising money.

Love them or hate them, successful fundraisers provide schools and organizations with items to supplement and improve the learning environment. At Holy Family School, recent fundraisers have paid for new computers, Chromebooks, iPads, Smartboards, classroom air conditioning and gym equipment.

“Because we don’t receive state funding for things like textbooks fundraising is a very important part of a private school’s budget,” Gendron said. “Fundraising allows us to have those extra things that aren’t an absolute necessity, but are good for the students and help to enhance our curriculum,” she said. “When it’s all said and done, these fundraisers are all about the kids and investing in their futures.”

— Multiple factors contribute

to successful fundraisers —