Three short stories from organizations that switched

Elementary PTA

Tiger Trot Fun Run

Westside Elementary PTA · Donation drive

A K-5 PTA swapped a paper-pledge fun run for an online donation drive and exceeded its goal in twelve days.

The PTA had run the Tiger Trot on paper pledge cards for nine years. Last spring the treasurer — a parent who is also a CPA — asked whether an online drive could replace the cash collection. The principal agreed to try it for one year.

The PTA president registered the org on a Wednesday evening, entered the school's address, and started on the self-attested fast-track. She invited the two co-advisors who run the fun run, and the school's NCES record came back the next morning — a verified badge appeared on the campaign page without any further paperwork.

Each of the 50 homeroom teachers got a roster of their students. A fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Chen, built the campaign, wrote the story, and added the school logo. The principal approved it; the president paid the launch fee; the campaign went live twenty-two minutes after the registration email landed.

Donations came in from grandparents, aunts and uncles, and a few local-business owners who had always written a check. The goal was $4,000; the campaign closed at just over $5,000. The treasurer's reconciliation took an afternoon, not a weekend, and the school board asked the PTA to do it again next year.

Athletics booster

Road-Trip Jersey Sale

Lincoln High Basketball Boosters · Product sale

A high-school basketball booster club sold custom travel jerseys as a print-on-demand pre-sale and covered the cost of three nights on the road.

Each year the basketball boosters run a fall fundraiser to cover travel for the holiday tournament — hotels, a bus, meals. In past years they sold spirit wear out of a gym-bag inventory and usually broke even. The booster president had used Fundly's print-on-demand integration at a previous school and asked the new AD to give it a try.

She set the campaign up as a pre-sale: cards charged at checkout, orders sent to the printer in one batch when the window closed. The campaign listed a hoodie and a short-sleeve travel jersey in two colorways. The print-on-demand mockup showed up in the dashboard the same hour.

The boosters shared the campaign link in the existing booster email list — exported from Constant Contact as a CSV and re-imported in under a minute. Eighty players and family members ordered. The store closed at $8,500 in revenue; the wholesaler's invoice came in at $4,200, leaving enough to cover the bus and two of the three hotel nights with cash to spare.

The launch fee was the only Fundly cost. Time from registration to live campaign was under twenty minutes; the rest of the work — the design, the email blast, the post-campaign order submission — was the same as any other year.

Middle-school band

Spring Band Trip Drive

Westside Middle School Band Boosters · Donation drive + offline

A middle-school band covered half the cost of a spring competition trip with a four-week donation drive, with parents running the whole thing.

Sixty-five students, four chaperones, a spring competition six hours away. The band boosters' annual trip fundraiser had always been a letter-writing campaign — a packet of envelopes and a stack of return-address labels. The new booster treasurer decided to try the online version alongside the paper one, in case the families who had moved to online bill-pay were not writing checks the way they used to.

The treasurer was not technical. The setup was: register the org, pick "standard mode," invite the band director as an advisor, paste the trip description into the story field, set a $12,000 goal, and launch. The band director approved and the treasurer paid the launch fee. The campaign was live twenty-seven minutes after she had opened the registration page.

Online donations came in steadily over four weeks — about $9,000 — and the paper-letter campaign brought in another $3,000, which the treasurer entered as offline donations on the campaign's reconciliation page so the progress bar reflected the real total. The trip was fully funded, with a small reserve left over for the next year's bus.

The booster board noted the launch fee in its next meeting minutes as the only cost of running the campaign and voted to make the online drive the default going forward.