The Chatter

I can’t believe that it is almost back to school time but it is FAST approaching. It seems like just yesterday school was letting out and a long lazy summer stretched out in front of us. Now it’s less than 3 weeks and school will be in full swing.

It seems like there are always things that the school could use and not enough money to cover the expenses.  I noticed that almost all of the fund raisers centered around selling something (pies, pizza, candy bars, candles etc) Although some of those were profitable the people who really make the profit are the one’s who sold the school the pies, pizza, candy bars etc!!

I wanted to come up with ideas that would make money without costing the parents anything. The Scrip program seems to be an excellent vehicle to accomplish this goal. You have to be a non-profit organization and you have to set up an account. You buy gift cards or “scrip” from a company at a reduced rate and the difference between what you pay and what it is worth is the profit margin.

For example our local grocery store is Martin’s and they offer a 4% discount. So for every $100 we sell the school earns $4. It doesn’t  take long to spend $100 at the grocery store these days AND they also sell gas!!! 4% to the school for every dollar spent at the pump will definitely add up!! The scrip is available for tons of stores and the percentage back varies. A local mass retailer offers 2%, some retailers pay up to 17% and the local movie theater offers 7% .  Now a days it costs my family $30 to go to the movies  so that’s $2.10 earnings for the School.

The beauty of this program is that it does not cost the parents any money! They just need to be deligent about buying the gift cards.

I am very excited about kicking this program off for our school. We will be placing our first order next week (with a trial group of parents to work out any kinks in the system). I am hoping that it will add big bucks to the school’s budget and that we can do lots of great thing for the students and eventually eliminate all of the other fund raisers. 

I will keep posting to let you know our progress.

Thanks for reading!

MdCaterer