Kids and Stickers. They go together like sparkles and glue, like gift-wrap and tape, like paste and construction paper. Kids love Stickers. Educators know that kids love Stickers. Marketing professionals know that kids love Stickers. Isn’t it time you used a resource your school has in abundance—kids—and one that you can obtain easily—Stickers—to promote your school, motivate your students, and create something unique to represent your values?

Adherence: Marketing 101

The best way to sell something is to get your customers to sell it for you. If you’ve ever invited corporate sponsors into your school, or participated in any large, multi-school program, you’ve most likely noticed that free Stickers are offered to your kids. Some of them may end up in the trash, the laundry, or the bottoms of your students’ sneakers, but it only takes one Sticker, stuck in the right place, to create free advertising.

Some adults may be wary of sticking ads on their personal property. Not so with kids! Those who love Stickers the most will be happy to stick any corporate logo on their notebook. Why not take advantage of this trend to market your school? If a child will happily display the name of a company that has offered him or her a free water bottle, how much more will they be willing to spread the word about the school they love?

Follow Instructions

All you need to do is print your school’s name on a stack of Vinyl, Economy, or Bumper Stickers. But don’t stop there. You’ve got a website, right? Prominent inclusion of the URL makes it easier for potential parents to find you online. What about a logo? If you haven’t got a logo, hold a contest and get the kids to draw one for you. Now you’ve got a beautiful, child-centric design to attract the people you want.

Other options include adding an image of your school, your mascot, prominent alumni, or anything else that appeals to your students. This is a creative medium! Stretch your mind: find the images that work for you, and add your names and website to create the perfect marketing tool.

The Old Math

You may already be using Stickers to spread the word. Many schools offer Bumper Stickers to parents of honors children, and more recently, these Stickers have been customized for parents of children in the band, on sports teams, with perfect attendance, or even those who simply show up on a semi-regular basis. “Proud Parent of an XYZ School Student” may be enough.

If you’re not already offering Bumper Stickers along these lines to your parents, either as rewards for their children’s performance or as part of your fundraising efforts, this is one situation when you want to be on the bandwagon.

The New Math

Bumper Stickers are, as they say, Old School. They certainly get around, but there’s more to the story. Why aren’t you offering your kids custom Stickers with their school’s name on them?

If you begin with an assortment, you can use them as incentives and rewards for different activities. You can create Stickers for each athletic team, each after-school activity, each instrument in the band. You can create Stickers that celebrate grades, attendance, or community service.

You can create a range of collectible Stickers to motivate young children to complete a series of tasks so they can collect them all. You can create customized rewards that will be highly coveted. Just find an inexpensive source for items that children need or want anyway, then slap a Sticker in the center:

• Notebooks
• Pencil cases
• Water bottles
• Kleenex packets
• Binders
• ID cards or badges
• Folders

Better yet, ask your students what kind of prizes they’d like to earn!

The more items available, the more stealth marketing you can do. Wherever your kids take their Stickers, they’re offering your school free publicity.

Final Exam

Small and portable, the possibilities are pretty much limited by how many Stickers you’re willing to buy and your creativity in finding ways to use and distribute them. Once they’re in the kids’ hands, those Stickers will announce to the world you’re your school is on the map. Whether you choose to sell them or give them away, offer them as prizes or incentives, Stickers in schools create a winning situation all around.

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This two part series gives your school an advantage through the power of Search Engine Optimization, resulting in more relevant traffic to your web site. Part one of the series covered the importance of good SEO, along with some ideas regarding search friendly website design. Part two includes tips, tools, and techniques for better keyword choice and placement, as well as link building strategies.

Keywords

Keywords provide search engines with an idea of what your site is about, and search engines search for the most relevant sites under any given keyword. You can optimize your site by choosing the most appropriate keywords and providing meaningful content regarding those keywords. This is where your school can gain an advantage over competing schools. The keywords you choose to optimize should be those that parents use most often when searching for a school for their children.

3 Tips for Choosing the Right Keywords

• Find keywords that are used frequently by people searching for information on schools but are not included in competing school’s websites, and optimize your site for some of those keywords. Many school websites are optimized for very general terms such as “Athletics.” While this may describe navigation within that certain site very well, parents are more likely to type in a keyword such as “youth basketball.”

• Find the most popular common keywords that most schools use and optimize your site for those keywords better then they can. This is equally as important as the above technique, but will prove to be more of a challenge.

• Incorporate some variations of a few of your common keywords. These might include misspellings, plurals, synonyms, and local place names or idioms.

Deciding on the right keywords to optimize is probably the most challenging, but also highly rewarding (traffic wise) SEO activity a school can engage in. Luckily there are some tools and techniques that can help you accomplish this.

5 Keyword Tools and Techniques

• Word Tracker is an online tool that tells exactly how many people are searching for any given keyword each month.

• Nichebot.com offers a number of keyword tools including a keyword list cleaner.

• Yahoo and Google both offer keyword tools.

• Determine what sites use your selected keywords in their title by searching intitle:keyword. Then find what sites use your keyword within their body text by searching intext:keyword. (Of course, you’ll want to replace “keyword” in this example with your keyword. Don’t add any extra spaces, or the search won’t work.)

• Review your website referral logs for commonly used keywords. After building a decent list, incorporate some of the keywords into your website using the tips outlined below, and then monitor results. Keyword selection is an ongoing process and requires significant trial and error. There is always something you can change to yield a better ranking.

5 Tips for Better Keyword Placement

Choosing the right keywords is only the first step to keyword optimization. Strategic placement of keywords within a website is equally important.

• The title tag of a website is the best place to put top keywords. Make sure that the title for each page in the site does a good job of targeting the keywords you chose in the above steps, while still effectively describing the actual content on each page.

• Incorporate the rest of your important keywords into the headline.

• Keywords in the body text should focus on 2-3 specific keywords per page.

• Meta tags are bits of data embedded in HTML code that provide information on any given web page. Meta tags should target prospective students, be individualized, and be placed on each page of the site. Doing this will increase the chance that a random web surfer will stumble upon your site while searching for information topically related to the content on any given page within the site.

• Place keywords toward the top of the page rather than further down.

Finally, don’t overdo it! If you use any given keyword too often in your text or your meta tags, Google may get suspicious. Your keywords should appear organic to the writing.

Links, Links, and More Links

Persuading other highly ranked, relevant, and related sites to link to your site is critical to making your page rank highly among search engines. There is no shortcut to achieving this type of linking structure. It simply takes a significant amount of effort. The good news is

you probably have a lot of entities willing to link to your site already. The following are the different type of links and linking strategies.

• Inbound Links – Start by contacting web-savvy groups or individuals affiliated with your school and ask if they want to place a link on their site that directs web surfers back to yours. This type of link is called an inbound link. For more inbound link ideas, check out other school’s websites and see who is linked to them. Achieving a linking structure that appears natural to search engines will help achieve greater results. Getting highly ranked, topically relevant pages to link to your site is ideal. But, if links are obtained from sites not boasting these characteristics, it is likely to only help and not hurt your rankings. In general, the more inbound links you can obtain the better.

• Reciprocal Linking – Some entities may only want to trade links. This is called reciprocal linking. Establishing a reciprocal link entails placing a link on your site directing visitors to another site in exchange for that site providing a link on their site back to yours. Search engines do not value reciprocal links very highly, but a few reciprocal links are not bad; they will help achieve a more natural looking link structure. This idea also holds true with lower ranking sites. While you don’t want to have a lot of low ranking site links, a few will usually provide a slight boost in your website’s rankings, and also help achieve a more natural appearing link structure.

• Anchor Text – Another factor that is pivotal to achieving a natural linking structure is establishing varied, keyword rich anchor text for each link obtained. Anchor text is the text displayed in the link on another page linking back to yours. If websites linking to your site are willing to accept suggestions for the anchor text, make sure each one is varied and include common keywords.

• Website Content - One of the best ways to generate inbound links is to incorporate valuable content into your webpage. Other websites will be more likely to link to your site if you provide content useful to them or their visitors. Hosting a blog or forum is a great way to do this. It should not be hard to find parents or faculty members to contribute valuable information to your blog. For information on how to optimize your blog for search engines look at ProBlogger.net. For more information on creating valuable blog content, visit buildabetterblog.com.

Similarly, hosting a forum is useful for site visitors, students, and faculty alike. It encourages personal communication and an exchange of ideas. Monitor your forums to stay in touch with your audience, and to understand what topics appeal to them. Craft new content accordingly.

Another great option is to post Podcasts or Video Feeds on your site. If faculty member or credible guest speaker hosts an interesting lecture, post it as a video or Podcast. Any of the above options present good alternatives for creating valuable content on your web page, a characteristic that attracts inbound links.

SEO is one of the easiest ways for a school to establish a sustainable competitive advantage online. The payoff from focusing funds toward SEO is greater than traditional marketing efforts. Effectively planning and implementation of the above components will certainly end in pleasing results.

For information on the importance of good SEO, as well as search friendly website design read, “Guide to Improved Search Engine Optimization for School Websites: Part 1.”
 

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The news can't be avoided. Our public schools are in the midst of an unprecedented budget crisis. All across the nation, school districts are being forced to cut back on programs. In many places, sports, music, arts, foreign languages and other curriculum which are often considered "non-essential" have already seen the chopping block. Forced to tighten their belts, school districts now have to make tough decisions about where to cut next. Proposals such as reducing staff, laying off teachers and cutting the school day and year have all been put forward as budgets continue to shrink.

In a time of such fiscal crisis, school fundraising has become more vital than ever. Many communities are stepping up the effort to bring in new streams of revenue so they can support their students and supplement shrinking government funding.

Unfortunately, with so many groups adding their voice to the fundraising chorus, the effort to raise funds has become a cacophony. Savvy community members and parents can find themselves frustrated, wanting to provide the best education for their children and finding hands out grasping for funding at every turn. Some individuals, tired of the constant barrage of requests, have been turned off completely from the idea of donating to yet another school related cause.

Many fundraisers feel all too familiar. Car washes, bake sales, and candy bar drives all fade into one another, occurring so frequently that community members become exhausted. Confronted by so many causes it's impossible to keep track of what they have contributed to. Overwhelmed by the crowded fundraising market, some individuals simply stop giving, feeling they have given enough already.

In light of this, it's important to meet fundraising burnout, with creative and savvy solutions. If your organization finds that its donations are decreasing, it may be time to reassess your efforts and give your fundraising plan a makeover.
 
Consider what  West Lafayette, School District in Indiana did when it found its schools falling far short of its desired budget. Realizing that many small fundraisers were raising just a little money here or there in a scattershot approach, members of the community created a foundation through which all of the money could be funneled through. Though a number of fundraisers, from barbecues to garage sales, take place, participants know the money goes to one organization. With a united community, the foundation has more power to not only raise funds, but has a strong recognizable brand that can put itself behind political efforts to get new school funding referendums on the ballot.

In this way, traditional fundraising like school carnivals and raffles don't have to be thrown out completely. Instead the school fundraising groups organize around a central organization that the community can recognize and rally around.
 

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If you’ve already read “The Smart Money: Online Fundraising for Schools Part One,” you know why the Internet is your best bet for expanding your donor list and your profits. You’ve read a few tips to get started, and you’re ready to learn the rest: ten more ways to boost your online fundraising dollars, make the most of donor communication, and promote your school’s online fundraiser, along with some basic guidelines for conducting online or offline fundraisers.

Communication and Promotion

 Use the Internet to keep your potential donors aware of your school and its needs. You’ll want ongoing communication to ensure everyone’s up to date on upcoming fundraising events and school needs, particularly those of student clubs, organizations, and teams. The more involved they are, the more they’ll give. Here’s how to keep everyone in the loop.

4. Start an email Campaign
Starting an e-mail or e-newsletter campaign is the most important step you can take to ensure the success of your online fundraiser. If people aren’t informed, they won’t help. Make your campaign a success with the following tops:

• Tailor Emails to Recipients’ Interests: Build detailed profiles for each potential donor. You can send an initial email asking about the recipient’s needs and demographic, or you can send more surveys and polls over a longer period of time. The second option is often best, as it allows for better relationship building as you gather information and develop continually more personalized emails.

• Do Not Solicit in Initial Mailings: Even the most generous among us usually don’t care to give money to organizations or individuals before we have established some relationship. The importance of not soliciting recipients with their first email cannot be emphasized enough. Initial emails should be used to gather information on the recipient’s needs and interests in order to provide more valuable content. There is a direct correlation between the relationships built with potential donors and the amount they will give.

• Purchase email Marketing Software: Email marketing software will save you time and money. This software allows you to automatically upload your donor database into an email marketing application and helps you tailor your emails to a recipient’s interests. Emaillabs.com offers great basic email marketing software. WildApricot, Convio, GetActive, and LocalVoice are designed specifically for online fundraising and offer a handful of specialized tools not offered by general email applications.

• Establish a Schedule for Writing and Distributing: The whole point of an email marketing program is to hold the recipients’ attention by keeping them continually informed. People should look forward to receiving your email. Establish a set frequency based on time constraints and your school’s ability to produce relevant news or content.

For more information on email marketing read "Stay Between the Lines! Your School Email Marketing Campaign".

5. Start School Blogs and Forums
Forums are especially great for school websites. They provide parents, students, community members, and faculty a place to share ideas and become involved. An active forum helps you understand the community’s concerns and communicate instantly. A blog is a great way to provide information on current school happenings.

6. Incorporate a Web Calendar
Integrating a web calendar into the school website is essential because it allows visitors to view upcoming fundraising events at a glance. There are many web calendar applications out there. Trumba event calendars (www.trumba.com) are easy to use and boast a number of features. Google and Yahoo both offer free event calendars.

7. Integrate an RSS Feed
RSS feeds automatically update subscribers on new website content or events; there’s no need for users to continually check your website. New blogs, email newsletter shipments, wiki page updates, and upcoming fundraising events should be placed on an RSS page. This will greatly increase fundraiser participation.  For more info on creating RSS feeds visit /www.wilsonweb.com.

8. Create Wiki Pages
A wiki page is a webpage that can be edited by website visitors. Wikipedia is the most commonly known wiki site: a visitor edited, free encyclopedia. Submit your school’s details and history to this site, as it often comes up first in search results. Wiki pages for every sports team and student organization can be of great benefit. Parents, students, and staff can contribute unique pictures and stories about each group, establishing a sense of community while keeping the entire community informed about student activities. Write about notable alumni, too. Giving staff the ability to quickly edit these pages will make them more valuable and interesting. Search engines consider frequently updated content more valuable, so wiki pages increase your website’s natural search results. JotSpot provides a fully integrated wiki application that makes creating wiki pages a breeze. While most wiki pages are text based, JotSpot allows you to create rich web-based spreadsheets, calendars, documents and photo galleries with ease. For additional information on general wiki page creation, visit www.intersci.ss.uci.edu.

9. Create and Distribute Charity Badges
A charity badge is a small widget, often including a picture, brief description of the organization, and link to where you can make a donation. Using charity badges is good practice for any fundraising campaign. Although they may or may not produce large donations, they are an effective way to promote a fundraiser. Placing yours in targeted locations can help you reach new demographic groups. These badges also allow users to share with one another by simply clicking on “get this badge” and copying the html code onto their website or blog, which helps you target individuals who may donate. They are inexpensive and easy to create. Simply follow step-by-step instructions though providers such as CareBadges or ChipIn.
To get your school’s charity badge started, choose a provider and create a badge.  Then, email those who would be most likely to make a contribution or share the badge with others. After this, donate to your charity badge yourself, and have co-workers and friends do the same. People are much more likely to donate if they feel they are part of something big. Finally, promote your badge though your school blog, social networking sites, email newsletter, or forums.

The Basics

Here are some basic tips to increase the effectiveness of any fundraiser.

10. Base Appeal on Benefits, Not Needs
Communicate how your school will be a better place for children, or the community will be better off as a whole, after receiving fundraising dollars.

11. Create a Sense of Urgency
Communicate the need for urgent action with clear deadlines and purposes. Catch people in the moment, with a sense of immediacy, and they are more likely to make a donation. 

12. Provide Convenience for Donors
Give donors the convenience of paying online, over the phone, or via mail.  Establishing several media for submitting donations or purchasing Raffle Tickets increases the likelihood of participation.

13. Following up with a Thank You
Don’t forget to send thank you notes to any direct donors, big Raffle Ticket customers, and purchasers of auction items.

14. Use Online Fundraising as a Supplement
Encourage online participation, but don’t let this be the only alternative. A lot of people do not want to become engaged with the online process. Make sure traditional fundraising activities are still in place. Online fundraisers are long arms, while traditional fundraising is the backbone of your fundraising efforts. Think integration. Allow your offline and online fundraising efforts to complement each other.

 

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You need extra-curricular activities, office supplies, and roof repairs. You need to make up for the budget cuts, expanding classes, and an increase in Internet bandwidth. In short, you need money. When the PTA is stretched thin and your kids refuse to sell another chocolate bar, it’s time to take matters into your own hands. Don’t worry if your hands are tied! You can earn more money for your school with online fundraising, and you never even need to leave your desk. In this two-part article, we’ll discuss the why and how of filling the coffers without overwhelming your calendar.

7 Reasons to Take Your School Fundraising Campaign to the Net

1. Online giving grows exponentially every year, from just over a half a billion dollars in 2000 to more than $4.5 billion in 2005. (www.groundspring.org)

2. One-click giving helps convert the philanthropic urge into fast action. Your supporters are much more likely to turn their impulse to help into actual donations, Raffle Ticket purchases, or auction bids, when they’re online. The instantaneous nature of the Internet promotes action by catching people in the moment. Being “close to the click” means being close to donors and dollars.

3. Online fundraising eliminates geographic borders. With the right incentive, you can attract a world of potential donors outside your region.

4. People are more generous online. An email campaign launched by North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics resulted in a 20% increase in the average donation. Their overall efforts resulted in a 150% ROI. (www.bronto.com)

5. Online fundraising attracts alternative demographics. cMarket conducted a study concluding that 71% of their online bidders are women. They found that women are turned off by the highly competitive, testosterone induced environment of the traditional auction. Internet bidding turned this demographic into major donors.

6. The Internet is quickly becoming donors’ medium of choice because it’s quick and easy.

7. Online Fundraising is a great option when your potential patrons are pressed for time. The typical auction lasts 1 to 3 hours; fewer people will be able to attend in that small window. Online auctions generally lasts 1 to 3 weeks, expanding the potential for more people to make more bids.

14 Ways to Boost Your School’s Online Fundraising Dollars

Think you know fundraising? Online fundraising is a different beast! If you’re ready to made the move from traditional fundraising to Internet fundraising, here are a couple of things to keep in mind.

1. Offer Big Incentives for Big Returns
Online fundraising works on a much larger scale than a PTA pancake brunch. You’re not limited to your usual group of donors; you’ll be tapping into an audience that is larger and more diverse. However, you’ll be competing for their attention, so they can be much harder to engage and coerce into action. You need the right incentives. The Mount Madonna School, located in San Jose, conducted a raffle with a $1.8 million, 2800-square-foot dream home as the prize. They set a benchmark of 26,000 tickets at $150 each before the house could be given away. Even though they fell short, selling only 19,137 tickets sold, they still gave $1 million to the top winner and $141,000 to the remaining 319 winners, and while managing to raise $1 million for themselves. Eliminating geographic limitations and providing the right incentive creates a massive audience, and your rewards grow exponentially.

2. Partner With Online Fundraising Providers
To greatly expand the audience for your auctions, consider selling on eBay Giving Works.  (www.givingworks.ebay.com/). eBay Giving Works is dedicated to nonprofit and charity listings. Start by signing up on MissionFish (www.missionfish.org/), a site that makes it safe and easy for nonprofits to sell on eBay. AuctionPay (www.auctionpay.com) is another resource that can help create bidding activity outside your school’s local geographic range.  St. Mark’s School instituted AuctionPay’s Online Auction Solution and managed to raise $25,000, more than one-fourth of the school’s total revenue of $97,000. A bidding war even erupted between two grandmothers, one in Florida and one in California, over lunch with a teacher, followed by a movie at a local cinema. The experience sold for $2,200 (www.nptimes.com).

3. Measure Everything
One of the great things about fundraising online is there are many useful ways to measure the effectiveness of your campaign. Normal metrics you should gather with your email campaign include email open rate, click-through rate, forward rate, opt-out rate, and email list growth rate. You can also track valid website metrics as well, including traffic growth, and the number of visitors who register. It’s also important to keep track of online versus offline funds raised, and the number of participants that are new donors.

Read Part 2 of The Smart Money: Online Fundraising for Schools for 11 more ways to improve your school's online fundraising efforts.

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You’ve got a school that needs marketing, and you know email is a fast, cheap, and effective way to spread the word. But how do you go about it? Here’s a simple outline to get started.

1. Target Your Audience
Successful marketing campaigns build meaningful relationships with an audience. Boring emails and constant pleas for money do not endear you to parents and alumni. They erode trust and generate email that ends up in the trash. Effective emails offer valuable and relevant content. Sculpt information around your audience’s interests.

1. Upon first contact, provide some friendly, useful data: basic details about your school, its philosophy, or history. Then, ask your readers what they want. Create a list of topics with corresponding check boxes, or send questionnaires and surveys so you have firsthand information for the future.

2. Interests may change or shift. Send update surveys once a year to ensure that your content maintains relevance to your audience. Continually gathering this data allows you to tailor your content to your audience. Emails will become more valuable and recipients will anticipate their arrival.

3. If there are more than a few dozen addresses on your mailing list, organization can get complicated. Buy an email marketing program to target your email messages while eliminating the time-consuming task of manually uploading and inputting data. Email Labs (www.emaillabs.com) provides an excellent email marketing application, but there are several out there. Shop around and see what works best for you.

2. Link to Relevant Information
Add value to your emails with relevant links: new or popular pages on your school website, related articles, resources, and other websites. For example, a parent with a child involved in football may wish to receive links to the football schedule, as well as a link to information on preventing adolescent injuries.

3. Timing is Everything
Time – Weekends are a terrible time to send an email. Tuesday and Wednesday (and, to a lesser extent, Thursday) are the best days . Over 60 percent of emails are opened between Tuesday and Thursday. Roughly 30 percent of emails are sent between 9 am and 11 am. Seven percent are opened at 11 am and 60 percent are opened between 8 am and 4 pm (www.emaillabs.com). Early morning in the middle of the week is the optimal time to send new emails. Of course, you need to find out what works for your school and your campaign, which is why measuring and adjusting (discussed below) is incredibly important.

Frequency – Send too many messages (and especially too many donation requests) and your audience will tune out. On the other hand, if you don’t send enough, you can’t maintain your connection. Choose a regular schedule, once a week or twice a month. Ask people what they want. If you’ve effectively completed steps one and two, recipients will look forward to your regular, interesting, and ingeniously written email newsletters. Create and stick to a reasonable schedule, taking into account the resources needed to gather relevant information and the time necessary to write, edit, and publish the newsletter.

4. Keep it Catchy and Clean
Titles, subject lines, and introductions should be short and catchy. When your recipients are skimming through email subjects, what compels them to open yours? Grab their attention with easy to read subject lines on interesting topics. The body of the email should also avoid clutter and information overload. Stick with clean, logical, and organized layouts. Edit down to the essentials.

5. Facilitate Viral Marketing
If you’ve created relevant, clever, catchy, interesting content, recipients will want to share it. Make it simple for them to provide you this free advertising by integrating an “Email This” or “Share This” link into your template. Provide a link at the top of the email near the headline or title, as well as the bottom of the email. Include the “Email This” icon (the back of an envelope) or something similar so it‘s easily recognized. This type of social marketing helps you reach new audiences. People who are willing to share your email may have friends who are also interested and willing to share. As your emails spread, so does your schools’ exposure. You may recruit potential students or engage new supporters.

6. Tracking, Measuring, and Adjusting in 3 Steps
1. If you can, track all statistics relevant to your email campaign, and review the numbers. Understanding your click-through-rate, open rate, click to open, bounce rate, referral rate, and unsubscribe rate helps you gauge the success of your email campaign and adjust accordingly.

2. Your email marketing campaign should increase hits on schools website. Track website traffic coming through those targeted links in your emails to determine the overall effectiveness of your campaign as well that of individual emails.

3. If your current email campaign has a lousy performance record, reconsider design and implementation. Ask readers basic questions. Why don’t they find it valuable? Does the content need to be more targeted? Email campaigns are an ongoing process requiring continual attention and direction. Success will vary in the short term, so keep historicals and adjust your approach every year.

7. Build Trusting Relationships
The key to any marketing campaign is building trusting and ongoing relationships with your audience. Period. Email is a useful tool, but if you abuse it, you will shatter that trust. Also, don’t disregard your tried and true forms of marketing and communicating with your audience either. And always remember that people give to people, not organizations or emails. Be human!

Email is an exceptional way to encourage communication with your community, and communication leads to feedback, donations, recruitment, and promotion of school events. These seven tips are an outline for achieving your goals. It’s up to you to fill it in!

Lance Trebesch and Dustin Stoltz
lance@TicketPrinting.com
TicketPrinting.com

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There’s no school like your school! Unfortunately, there are millions of school homepages, and your website can get lost among all those search results. For instance, Google “Waldorf School” and you’ll end up with 681,000 results. “Catholic school” returns 8.5 million results. “Charter school” clocks in at 13.8 million results! Most likely, however, the people looking for your school are right in your own backyard, and search engines are beginning to recognize the need for localization in search results.

What is local search?
Local search is a relatively new function that shows up to ten business or organization listings ahead of the rest of the search results. In theory, these listings should be more relevant to any individual search and trump other results. Optimizing for local search ensures that your website ranks higher for searches that originate closest to your school.

How does local search work?
Google and other search engines do not reveal their algorithms to the public, but we can make some educated guesses. The image above indicates that adding a regional or city name to the search keywords along with a type of business or organization generates these more relevant results. Search engines may also check IP addresses to determine the physical origin of the search.

How do I optimize for Local Search?
Luckily, search engines have made it easy for businesses, organizations, and schools to get listed as long as they provide a physical address. Here is a breakdown of things you can do to make sure your school ranks high in local search results.

Website content— Be certain to include your school’s mailing address at the bottom of each of your website’s pages. When search engines crawl your pages, they will index your address. You can also “geotag” your website by adding latitude and longitude to a meta tag. Read the Probloggers article: “Geoblogging – How to Geotag Your Blog” for a crash course in understanding these concepts.

Claim your name—Search engines that offer local search also offer businesses and organizations the opportunity to claim, edit, and update their listing. If your school is not showing up at all you can submit information, even if you are in multiple locations. Visit Google, Yahoo, and Bing, sign up, and follow the instructions. Another option is to use the Google Webmaster Tools to set your location. Be certain all information is accurate and that the listing points back to your school’s website.

Submit to information directories— These websites are similar to link directories, however, they will list your physical address along with your website. SuperPages.com, Citysearch.com, Yellow Pages, Switchboard.com and Yelp.com are just a few. Bruce Clay has a great resource to help you understand the local search engine relationship to other directories.

Reviews—Search engines and information directories both allow users to review and rate organizations, so you can create some in-house reviews and encourage parents and supporters to write more. Search engines will collect reviews from various sites and post them in an expanded listing. These reviews will also help boost your website’s authority in search results.
This quick guide to local search optimization should offer a glimpse into the constantly changing landscape of search engine parameters. For more information, try the Ultimate Local Search Optimization Resources.

Lance Trebesch and Dustin Stoltz
lance@TicketPrinting.com
TicketPrinting.com

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It might be a surprise, but research shows that the majority of organizations who hold raffle ticket fundraisers do not know how much money they will make until after the raffle is over. Nearly all raffles have a target amount of money that they would like the raffle to produce, and there is a simple calculation that can be made to see how many tickets you will need to sell at what price in order to meet that goal. By playing around with the quantity of raffle tickets and the pricing in order to match your customer base it is fairly easy to plan your raffle so that you meet your fundraising needs.

In order to help ensure that your next raffle ticket event is a success, the rest of the article describes factors that you should take into consideration when planning your fundraiser. This raffle ticket calculator utility will help you price the correct amount of raffle tickets for your event.
Fundraising Goal
It is important to know how much profit your organization would like to earn during your raffle ticket event. This value should be the ideal net proceeds to the event after all other costs have been subtracted.

Raffle Costs – There are several costs that can be incurred during a raffle ticket event. The list below lists the most common ones.

Raffle Ticket Costs: whether you print your raffle tickets yourself or have a company like www.TicketPrinting.com print the tickets for you, your raffle tickets are going to cost money. Often times the look and feel of the raffle ticket will help convey a sense of value to your supporters allowing you to charge more for them. I have talked to customers that wanted custom raffle tickets designed that looked expensive so that it would be easier for them to sell the raffle tickets at a higher price. This price should include all related costs as well (shipping, sales tax, and other fees all add up to produce the total cost of generating the tickets that you will use for your event).

Raffle Prize Costs: More often than not, you will not find an organization that is willing to just give you an item for you to give away (at least not something cool enough to make people want to win it). Often times you will have to pay at lease part of the price of the prizes for your event. Most people will be willing to give you a prize at a reduced price after you sell them on the publicity that they will be receiving as a sponsor to your event.

Raffle Ticket Distribution Costs: The distribution costs of your raffle include all of the related costs of marketing and selling your raffle tickets. This could be posters that will be printed or even a television or radio advertisement. What ever the costs are; they will be a factor in how profitable the event is.

Total Expected Raffle Ticket Revenue – The total revenue that your organization will receive as a result of the sales of raffle tickets is a factor of two things: the number of raffle tickets sold, and the price at which the tickets are sold. These are most likely the two variables over which you have the most control and the ones that are most important to match up directly to your customer group.

Quantity of Raffle Tickets: The quantity of raffle tickets should be decided upon while thinking about the number of people in your community who are likely to buy raffle tickets. It is important to remember that people often buy more than one raffle ticket and this can be encouraged by offering a discount if you buy a larger quantity of tickets ($5 each or 5 for $20 is an example of quantity discounts).

Price of Raffle Tickets: The price that you can charge for raffle tickets will depend on the prizes that you are offering and the demographic of your target market. Selling $100 raffle tickets to college students might be a long shot as would be selling $15 raffle tickets for a chance to win a DVD. When deciding the price you need to take into consideration how much the prizes would be worth to most of your participants. It will also help boost sales if the ticket price is a convenient amount (most people do not want to pay $3.76 for a raffle ticket).

Finalizing Price and Quantity of Raffle Tickets – Once you have an idea of the price that people will pay for your tickets and how many you can sell, you can calculate how much money you can earn. First, add up all of the costs of your event. As an example, $75 for Raffle Tickets, $500 for prizes and $50 for additional marketing materials would give us a total cost of $625. The next step is to add the fundraising goal to that value. If we wanted to raise $2000 we would add that to the $625 that we already have spent to get $2625.

Calculate Price of Raffle Tickets: Once we have the total revenue to be raised ($2625) we can find out what the price of the tickets would need to be for a given quantity of raffle ticket sales. To do this we divide the total revenue by the quantity of tickets. As an example, if we thought that we could sell 1000 raffle tickets we would need to sell each one for $3.63 to reach our goal (I would recommend that we round up to the nearest dollar).

Calculate Quantity of Raffle Tickets: To calculate how many raffle tickets we need to sell we can divide the total amount of revenue by the price of the tickets to find out how many tickets we need to sell. In our example, if we wanted to sell each ticket for $5 we would need to sell 2625/5= 525 tickets to meet our goal. Again I recommend always rounding up as most organizations can deal with extra money easier than they can with too little money.

This simple calculation will make it easier to plan profitable raffle ticket events that do not leave you in the dark.

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Your Challenge: The Successful Raffle

Great rewards require great effort. The payoffs from a prize draw can be substantial, if you make an investment of time, forethought, and common sense, but don’t count your revenue before it’s collected! Consider possible stumbling blocks. According to TicketPrinting.com’s survey of over 200 raffle holders, the top five most difficult tasks are:

• Selling Ticket
• Tracking Sales
• Encouraging Participation
• Soliciting Prize Donations
• Raising Awareness

There is no silver bullet solution, but there are resources and techniques to help your organization rise above obstacles.

1. Ticket Sales: By far, the #1 most difficult task reported was the ability to sell tickets. Different people have different tastes in prizes. Make sure your prizes make sense for your organization and your potential ticket purchasers. For instance, if your prize is a hunting package, you don’t go to animal rights groups to sell tickets. You try a sporting organization or a gun club! Do go to local business and other groups in your communities. Make your presence known at large gatherings, and don’t forget to ask your family and friends. Remember, you’ll sell more tickets with fun or clever promotions. Here are some ideas:

a.Early bird pricing: Offer a special low price in the early days of selling tickets. People love a good deal and will be more likely to buy.
b.Special deals: Find creative ways to give deals to customers. For example, offer $40 for as many tickets they can fit once around their head, waist, neck, etc…
c.Dunk, throw pies, or cut hair: Along with your prizes, find a sympathetic local celebrity (a school’s principal, a TV reporter, a popular coach) and sell tickets for a chance (or multiple chances) to dunk him, throw a pie at him, or cut his hair. Don’t forget to invite the newspaper and local media outlets for more publicity.
d. Advertise on your website, local radio, public events, newspapers, and at local business.
e. Prizes for sellers: Offering rewards for most tickets sold, most hours put in, or best attitude provides ticket sellers with an attractive goal.
It is also important that the consumer knows why you are selling tickets. You’re not just earning money for your cause, you’re also spreading its message. Create an enthusiastic sales pitch. Include your organization’s name and purpose, address frequently asked questions, and finish up with a request that the listener purchase tickets. Keep it short and sweet so you don’t lose their attention.

2. Tracking: Ticketprinting.com’s survey reported that 19% of nonprofits did not record ticket sales, but the government will require you to report the outcomes of your raffle. You’re legally obligated to keep track! Accurate tracking can also create a database of potential customers for your next raffle. Microsoft Excel was nonprofits’ favorite program for tracking, with 43% of all respondents using the program. Record everything! This includes names, relation to seller, phone number, email, addresses dates, ticket numbers. Excel allows you to easily set up a spreadsheet with all the required information. Set up your spreadsheet correctly, and it can be used over and over again. Below is an example of a typical recording spreadsheet in Excel:
   
   

   raffle spreadsheet
3. Participation: If your raffle will depend on volunteers, it may be hard to find reliable support. People can’t help if they don’t know about the raffle, so tell everyone about your opportunity. Joining online networks specifically for volunteering is an excellent way to connect your organization with people in your area who are ready and willing to help. Remember you must accommodate your volunteers. According to volunteermatch.org, 89% of volunteers think it is important for volunteering to fit into their schedule and 80% found it important to understand expectations. So be specific about your needs! Idle volunteers probably won’t come back. Always show your appreciation by following up with thank-you letters.
4. Donations: Finding the right prizes is the first step in initiating a successful raffle. There are many online sites where businesses and individuals can make donations. Sign up for one today and start collecting. Also, ask local business to provide prizes. They are often willing to give back to the community, especially if you can offer some positive publicity. Adding their logo to your Raffle Ticket or providing free ad space in your publication is a great motivator! Don’t be shy about approaching anyone who might help. You may be surprised when you find out how many powerful supporters you actually have.
5. Awareness: The most effective way to create awareness for a raffle is through word of mouth. Promote your raffle through your website, newsletters, email, TV, and meetings. Tell everyone about your raffle and ask them to do the same. 63% of the respondents in TicketPrinting.com’s survey said they hold raffles in conjunction with a major event such as a dinner or a sporting event. This way your raffle can be promoted through the event as well.

Now you know the challenges and the solutions. Get out there and start selling Raffle Tickets to support your organization!

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This two part series shows schools how to gain the advantage of a technique used by many online marketers called Search Engine Optimization.  SEO is the practice of designing a website to include popular keywords and strategic linking structure in order to achieve a high ranking in search engine results, and drive traffic to a site.  Part one of the series will cover the importance of good SEO, as well as some search friendly website design tips.  Part two will include some tips, tools, and techniques for better keyword choice and placement, as well as link building strategies.

5 Reasons Schools Should Invest in SEO

1. The internet is now the leading form of communication.
2. Parents and youth trust the web as an immediate and relevant resource.  Most people look to the web when seeking out any form of information.
3. The internet opens parents up to many more options when considering schools, they expect more, and are harder to convince.
4. With more options available to them, parents are also more selective of where their limited funds go; they want to know how you can maximize their child’s potential.
5. Investing in search engine optimization is the most efficient and effective way to drive parents and potential students to your site and boost enrollment.

You may have a great web page but it doesn’t serve a point if no one is able to find it. Even if your school already has considerable traffic there may be a way to gain even higher online visibility. The following techniques are an inexpensive way to gain a significant advantage over larger, well-funded schools.  In general SEO has three main components: search friendly web site design, keyword selection and placement, and link building.

Website Design

One of the most challenging aspects of SEO is finding a balance between including valuable and visually appealing content that keeps visitors engaged, and successful search engine optimization.

3 Quick SEO Friendly Web Site Design Tips

1. Limit Rich Media Content – While rich media content may be visually attractive to visitors it should be used with caution. Search engines work best with text and it is often difficult for them to effectively crawl frames and java content.  This makes it much more difficult to achieve a high ranking among search engines.  If it does not directly promote the benefits of your school it is a good idea to leave it out.  You must also consider that many visitors have a slow internet connection and will become frustrated while waiting for pages to load.  The tradeoff is ultimately up to you. The good news is that this technology is constantly improving as search engines become better at identifying information embedded in flash and java content.  There are ways flash content can be optimized for search, and a larger percentage of the population continues to obtain high speed internet connections. As a general rule it is best to stay knowledgeable of advancements and to balance new advances with traditional, proven, techniques.  It won’t be long before your school’s website can have the best of both worlds.
2. Use Sitemaps – Each page you build should link back to the site map, in addition to the homepage.  This makes it much easier for search engines to find all pages on your site and index them regularly.  If your site includes more than 100 pages than you should create additional site maps that all link to a master site map.  A link to the master site map should be located on each page of your website.
3. Use Silos – School websites tend to host pages with many different themes, such as, sports, student activities, teacher pages, etc; this has the potential to confuse search engines. A silo creates a directory that is connected to your general site concept (your school) but is also isolated around a theme (sports, drama).

Example:
Yourschool.com/sports/football.html
Yourschool.com/sports /volleyball.html
Yourschool.com/sports /soccer.html
Yourschool.com/sports /wrestling.html

Doing this will increase the chances that your site will be ranked for general keywords (schools) but it will also be ranked for more specific keywords (high school football teams). A good place for more information on creating silos would be Bruceclay.com. Ready for more? Check out Part II of this article!

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