By Laura Smith
Laura Smith is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management. She can be reached at: ls@MomentumMedia.com.
Athletic Management, 18.3, April/May 2006, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1803/outwiththeold.htm
In May 2005, residents of Medina County, Ohio, returned a “no” vote on the school budget. Athletic Director Ken Woodruff of Medina’s Buckeye High School was told that all sports would be cut.
One thousand miles south, at Pahokee High School in Palm Beach County, Fla., Athletic Director Malissa McAuley was overseeing a baseball program that had one bat and one ball for the entire team. Working in a financially strapped community, she cringed as she asked families for the $50 pay-to-play fee.
Two different states, two different scenarios, but both administrators—and three others whose stories are below—had one thing in common. When they urgently needed to find new ways to generate revenue, they abandoned old fundraising ideas and weren’t afraid to think big. Their strategies varied: They energized grassroots giving, learned to sell their projects to corporate donors, and braved the world of grant writing. And they succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations.
As Randy Richards, Athletic Director at Greenville (Tenn.) High School, puts it, “High school athletic directors are being asked to raise more and more money, and we are going to have to become more sophisticated at it. If we don’t, we’re going to be left in the dust.”
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
May can be a tough month for public school administrators. For Lance Pliego, Athletic Director at New Milford (Conn.) High School, May 2005 brought the fourth year in a row of athletics funding cuts, and he could see no way out of eliminating three sports. From a list of undesirable options, he opted to cut girls’ gymnastics, a co-ed swimming team, and boys’ golf. Thirty athletes were told they would lose their sport.
By the time their seasons arrived, however, the athletes were competing for their school. The miracle, Pliego says, was pulled off by a key group of people, and every town has them: business owners and entrepreneurs, CEOs and senior managers, physicians and lawyers—people whose connections make them a “who’s who” of a community.
In New Milford, they call themselves the Motivational Volunteers Promoting the Spirit of Sports and Activities (MVP-SOS). The group involves local businesspeople who gather twice a month over coffee at 6:00 a.m. to discuss how they can get other community leaders to support athletics at New Milford High. They are totally separate from the school’s booster club, and most members do not have children currently on athletic teams.
The group began a year and a half ago, and its first fundraiser, a formal dinner with a $50 ticket price, raised over $20,000 and paid for an electronic sign outside the school that promotes school activities and athletic contests. The group envisioned providing the extras—the items on Pliego’s wish list that otherwise wouldn’t be affordable.
But in the fall of 2005, Pliego asked MVP-SOS to do more: to save three sports from the chopping block. Their second annual fundraising dinner was already in the planning stages, so with the school board’s okay, MVP-SOS stepped up its goal and went to work. With the addition of a silent auction, the dinner brought in $32,000—more than enough to revive the three sports.
The key, says MVP-SOS spokesperson John Kaiser, was thinking big. For $75 per ticket (prices were raised $25 the second year), patrons enjoyed wine, dinner, and dessert, served in an elegant catering hall by professional chefs. The silent auction, set up in a large tent alongside the catering hall, included 28 high-ticket items—from sporting event tickets and ski trips to dinner certificates and golf outings—and contributed $10,800 to the final tally.
MVP-SOS members’ roots in the business community were another big factor in the dinner’s success. “Ninety-eight percent of all the proceeds from the dinner and auction were profit,” says Kaiser. “With our contacts, we were able to get local business owners to donate almost everything. The local golf course donated the services of their chef and the side dishes. A local meat packing company and a local supermarket gave us the meat and fish for the dinner entrees. And all of the items for the auction were donated, including a signed Derek Jeter baseball that a friend of mine who is a representative of Rawlings Sporting Goods secured.
“I’m in broadcast sales, another member is a physician’s assistant, and another has his own CPA firm,” Kaiser continues. “We rub shoulders with all kinds of people in the course of our work day. We sold all 240 tickets and got all of the items donated just by picking up the phone and chatting with people we know.”
Putting a face on the need for funds was important, too. Captains or seniors from every sports team were at the event, and Pliego placed player bios on each table. “Seeing the kids and reading about their accomplishments really made donors feel connected to the program,” Kaiser says.
The success of MVP-SOS could easily be duplicated elsewhere, Kaiser believes. He recommends starting by assessing the parents of your current student-athletes. “Is there anyone who is a community leader connected to local businesses?” he says. “Identify two or three such parents who you know care about the welfare of all the kids in the program. Approach them about starting a committee to get local business owners involved.”
Although MVP-SOS may become part of the booster club in the future, for now the two groups complement each other. “For us, the groups have two different sets of goals,” Pliego says. “The booster club focuses on smaller projects, like concessions stands and carwashes. MVP-SOS focuses on appealing to local businesses and corporate donors.
“However, at some point in the future I can see the two groups merging,” Pliego continues. “I think the booster club could be the central entity with MVP-SOS as an arm responsible for big projects.”
One thing that Pliego does not want to see happen, though, is MVP-SOS rescuing teams every year. “We all agree that we do not want MVP-SOS to be in the role of sponsoring sports,” he says. “From the start, we made it clear to the community and the superintendent that this was a one-time fix. Hopefully this year, the community will support the budget.”
TOTAL COMMUNITY EFFORT
Buckeye High School’s Ken Woodruff found himself in a similar position to Pliego in 2005, only worse. After his school district’s budget failed, Woodruff was told there would be no athletics funding at all. Buckeye didn’t have an MVP-SOS. But it did have a dedicated group of boosters, and the group asked the school board if they could attempt to save the program, starting with fall sports.
The move was unprecedented in Ohio, but the board agreed to let the boosters try. The caveat, however, was that they had to raise the entire cost of fall sports by the start of school. The group needed to have $60,000 up front and another $25,000 in escrow. They had five weeks.
Woodruff’s first move was to merge two formerly independent booster groups for band and athletics into the Buckeye Consolidated Boosters. Each sport retained its own parent group with representation to the whole. He then handpicked a five-member committee, which did the major organizing and served as liaison among volunteers, Woodruff, and the board of education.
Getting the word out on their plight was the committee’s first strategy. “The key element here was the sense of urgency, and we had to communicate that to the public,” Woodruff says. “We immediately launched a media campaign. I made sure to talk to newspapers as often as I could. We asked them to donate full-page ads and they did so about once a week. That really helped, because we started getting donations right away. Booster clubs from other schools even sent us money.”
Next, Woodruff helped the group plan its first major fundraiser, a golf outing that raised $35,000. Choosing the right volunteers to spearhead the event was critical to its success. “I am not a golfer,” Woodruff says. “But I found parents who are very into golf, and I also found a parent who is an event planner by profession. I put them together and it worked.”
Thanks to the event planner, the day evolved from simply a golf outing into a community day with activities for kids and non-golfers as well. The theme was “Survivor,” based on the popular television show, and coordinators planned a Hawai’ian luau, a silent auction, and 50/50 raffles. A local band gave a concert, and a fireworks display provided a finishing touch.
From there, the boosters planned a series of smaller fundraisers. “Our goal was to have unique events,” Woodruff says. “For example, we held an auction called ‘Bucks for Bucks’ where our student-athletes were up for sale. The auctioneer read a card that said, ‘Here are Tom, Jim, and Joe. They are willing to cut grass, clean basements, etc.’ People really liked the fact that the kids were working to help themselves, and it made community members feel connected to the people they were helping.”
Woodruff also figured out a way for individual athletes to benefit from their own efforts. “We set up a voucher system,” he explains. “Let’s say five kids worked at a car wash and it raised $100. Each of them got a slip of paper that said they had a $20 voucher toward their pay-to-play fee. The parent group for that sport kept the money, and when it came time for that athlete to pay his fee, he turned in his voucher along with his fee. I turned the voucher in to the parent group and they wrote a $20 check.
“That really helped, because we had to increase our pay-to-play fee to $365 per athlete,” Woodruff adds. “Our fall and winter sports generated $123,185 in participation fees, but almost $29,000 of that was in vouchers. Eighteen kids were able to pay their entire fee that way.”
Woodruff also worked hard to get scholarship donations for athletes who couldn’t afford the larger participation fee, with a $6,000 response. “We were afraid we’d see a drop in participation with the larger fee, but between the vouchers and donations, we actually saw an increase,” he says.
The sport-specific parent groups helped with smaller expenses. “We put in a rule that anytime a coach needs anything—a basketball, a soccer ball—they go to their parent group,” Woodruff says. “That saved us a lot of money.”
By the deadline, the boosters handed over $60,000 to the school board and the required $25,000 was safely in escrow. The football team went 10-0, the girls’ volleyball team notched the most wins in program history, and the girls’ soccer team was one win away from going to the state tournament.
“None of that would have happened if it wasn’t for this group of boosters,” Woodruff says. “This crisis pulled our community together.”
His final piece of advice? Work on creating strong connections in your community before you need them. “I’ve been here a long time and I’ve had the time to create ties with people,” he says. “Start building relationships and figure out which parents you can count on. The reason we were successful in averting this crisis is because I knew who to pull together to make the projects work.”
STRUCTURED FOR SUCCESS
When Randy Richards arrived at Greenville High School one year ago, he was prepared for a fundraising challenge. The school supplies about $10,000 a year in the athletics budget, and boosters traditionally raise an additional $50,000 to keep programs afloat. But Richards wasn’t prepared for the response he got from the first few donors he approached.
“Every one of them said, ‘We’re tired of getting so many calls from people asking for money for GHS athletics. Cut down on the calls,’” Richards says. “Basically, each of our sports was calling them separately.”
Then Richards discovered another problem. Businesses were being contacted by people who actually had no affiliation with the school at all. “They’d get a call from a company claiming it was making us a calendar as a fundraiser,” Richards says. “They would write a check to that company, and would get a calendar. But the money businesses were giving wasn’t directly benefiting us at all.”
Richards says he isn’t sure whether or not the outside groups were unscrupulous companies. But one thing was clear: If he didn’t stop the avalanche of calls, he was going to lose the funding that made his program viable.
His first move was to bring all calendars and miscellaneous publications in-house. He arranged to have them produced by the athletic department, and he let donors know that only those publications were official GHS documents. His second solution was to institute an entirely new fundraising structure—simplified, unified, and guaranteed to reduce his donors’ annoyance factor to zero.
“We sent a letter to all local companies promising that from now on, we would only contact them once a year,” Richards says. “We created a sponsorship program with seven levels of giving, ranging from $100 (a Devil sponsorship) to $5,000 (a platinum sponsorship). We invite them to choose a sponsorship level, and we offer them a series of perks based on the levels.”
Among other things, benefits include ads in sports programs, all-sport passes to home contests, advertising banners hung in the stadium and gymnasium and at the ballfield, parking passes, and cushioned stadium seats bearing their company’s name. The top level donors also receive passes to a hospitality room set up at home contests.
A handful of sponsors pledged at the highest level, and two companies even wanted to donate more. “I said no,” Richards says. “I wanted to have multiple donors at the top level and no one above that. If somebody gives more, they may feel like they are the ‘main donor’ and they should have a say in what goes on, so I capped it at $5,000.”
One benefit of the new program is that it allows Richards to make revenue projections with greater confidence. “When I sit down to work on next year’s budget, I can see exactly what will be coming in,” he says.
Another plus has been greater funding equity across programs, since all donations go directly to athletics rather than to specific sports. “Our football and basketball boosters are very active, and they have the most money, but they are the ones who need it the least,” Richards says. “Now all donations flow through my office and I can make sure each sport has what it needs.
“That doesn’t mean a donor can’t earmark a contribution for a specific sport,” he continues. “If they want to do that, I allow it. But then I don’t direct as many of the non-earmarked donations to that team.”
This aspect of the new plan has raised controversy since booster groups were used to having more control over their funds, but Richards is sticking to his guns. “I sat down with boosters and explained that my responsibility is to the entire athletic program and that this is a means of making things fair. Some parents accepted that and some didn’t,” Richards says. “But I am being patient and feel that most people will eventually see that it’s the right approach.
“What has convinced people the most is the success we’ve had,” he continues. “Donors are happy because they see that we have an organized, professional approach, and they’re willing to give more.”
In its first year, the sponsorship program generated $26,000, about half of the needed revenue, and the rest was filled in with smaller sales and fundraisers throughout the year. Richards expects the next pitch, which will take place in May, to raise significantly more. “There was an error made last year, and many local companies never got the solicitation letter,” he says. “There is a huge amount of additional administrative work needed to implement this new system, and I don’t think it can be effectively overseen by a volunteer or by me. So this year, I’m working on getting a paid person to take care of updating the contacts database and sending out the letters. I will pay them out of the athletics budget, because I believe the position will more than pay for itself.”
GOING FOR GRANTS
For Malissa McAuley at Pahokee High School, “fundraising crisis” describes her department’s status quo. “There is no budget here for athletics,” McAuley says. “They give us a small amount for game security, and that’s used up before football season ends.”
What about booster club efforts, parent volunteers, and fundraisers? For the most part, parents in her financially struggling community are stretched thin just putting food on the table, McAuley explains, and have little time to organize fundraising.
Over time, McAuley has done what she can on her own, earning the nickname “The Hustler.” “Every time people see me, I’m selling something,” she says. “Candy, flags, T-shirts, do-rags. But there’s only so many car washes you can do in one community. Every year, we’re in the hole by thousands of dollars, and we’ve been told that athletics won’t be bailed out again. Any sport that doesn’t pay its way is going to be cut.”
In response, this year McAuley has turned to grant writing. She obtained a $15,000 grant from the School Sports Foundation that rescued several sports from extinction, added new equipment, and covered pay-to-play fees for the school’s neediest athletes. Another grant, from the Cal Ripkin Sr. Foundation, brought a truckload of football equipment and baseball bats. And McAuley is hoping some other applications will come through as well, including one to Major League Baseball’s “Baseball Tomorrow Fund.”
Most of McAuley’s leads on grants come from searching the Internet. “I just never stop looking,” she says. “Before I got the School Sports Foundation grant, I was filling out the Cal Ripkin application.”
According to Cathy Bradley, Executive Director of the Baseball Tomorrow Fund, Web surfing for grants can be a reliable way to turn up possibilities. “Most applicants find us by searching phrases that describe their project, like ‘school sports,’ or ‘grants for sports facilities,’” she says. Another option is to visit Guidestar.com, she adds, a Web site that lists granting agencies and can be searched by grant type.
To determine if a grant is right for your project, it is important to carefully study the granting agency’s materials. “There is generally a list of funding criteria available on the agency’s Web site,” Bradley says. “Take a look at their mission statement. For example, our mission is to increase opportunities for kids who wouldn’t otherwise get to play baseball, so we look heavily at whether the applicant’s project will serve that goal.”
Most applications involve some combination of fill-in-the-blank answers to specific questions, opportunities to write about your project and its importance, phone interviews, and site visits from the granting agency. “My best advice is to do your homework before you apply,” Bradley says. “You need a complete plan of what your project is going to look like.”
Bradley also suggests gathering data on who will benefit. “Don’t just think of varsity athletes,” she advises. “Will youth sports in your area benefit? What are the demographics of each group? Will female athletes, minorities, or low-income residents benefit?”
It’s also necessary to have a working budget before you apply, including the total estimated cost and specific line items for each part of your project. An application that clearly shows your school administration’s support will help as well. “Granting agencies need to see that the project has official approval and will go forward if they fund it,” Bradley explains.
One last factor granting agencies consider is sustainability. If they fund your project this year, what will happen next year? “Have a plan to maintain any new fields or facilities,” Bradley says. “For uniforms and equipment, tell the agency how many years you plan to use the items and what plans you have for funding a replacement cycle.”
Even if you have never applied for a grant, don’t be intimidated by the process, says McAuley. “Yes, it takes work,” she says. “But anyone can successfully navigate a grant application if they need to. The money is out there, and with enough persistence, your program can benefit from it.”
For more advice on fundraising from Momentum Media, visit: www.FundraisingForSports.com.
SIDEBAR: THE RIGHT PITCH
Over the past two years, the Hickory (Tenn.) High School Athletic Complex Campaign Committee has raised $1 million to convert a former American Legion post into a state-of-the-art athletics complex. The group accomplished this remarkable goal largely because of one factor: They perfected the corporate pitch.
The first step was to find a spokesperson for the project, and Hickory Athletic Director John Worley found the perfect person in Warren Wood, who is the Town of Hickory's Assistant City Manager. “Warren is very comfortable in the business world,” Worley says. “He was able to speak the language, and that made people feel comfortable giving.”
Choosing the right members for a 16-person campaign committee was also important. “We looked for people who had contacts with local and regional businesses,” says Wood. “When it came time to make a pitch, we knew we’d need those people to get a foot in the door.”
Once the committee was in place, it began developing a detailed vision for the finished project. “We created a traveling road show with aerial photos of the site, blueprints and floor plans for the facility, and a written mission statement,” Wood says. “When we got to the point of asking for donations, companies could see that we had our act together.”
Next, they worked to illustrate that the Hickory community was behind the project. “We didn’t want to approach the big corporate folks right out of the gate—we needed to first build community awareness and enthusiasm,” Wood says. “Once we got a few big donations from community members, we went to some of the corporate donors and said, ‘We’ve already raised this much and we’re on course to succeed.’”
When the time finally came to approach corporate donors, the strategy was to find someone on the committee who had a connection to company higher-ups, ask them to schedule a meeting, and then have Wood arrive with all his materials. Researching beforehand allowed him to determine whether the company had close ties to the school, including alumni or parents. If so, he drew on those connections when he made his pitch.
Many of the larger companies had no direct link to the school, so for them, he worked to create a connection. “I went into more detail about why the project was needed and who would benefit,” he says. “I spent more time painting a picture of how a successful project would help the community as a whole.”