When you order your team trading pins, get try getting 100 or so extra pins for fundraising.

Depending upon how big your order is this might lower your price per pin, but more importantly it will give you a few extra pins per player that you can split up as "fundraising pins".  Have your players go around asking people to buy or sponsor "fundraiser pins" for $5 or $10 apiece to "help your team go to the World Series/Nationals".

First of all, it is easier to approach someone to ask for a $10 donation for your team, if you are giving them something in return.  Furthermore, the "fundraiser pin" gives you a reason to ask someone or knock on a neighbor's door for a donation to your team.  If you sell just 10 pins per player like this for $10 apiece, you will most likely pay for all of your team's trading pins for the season.  Lastly, you will get much more of a profit return by picking up a few extra "fundraising pins" and then selling them than you would selling candles, discount cards or beef jerky.

Here is a $5000+ fundraiser idea for your team:  How well does this work?  Pretty well for many teams each year.  Metro Pins has several teams that order early from us each year and they do this or something very much like it.  Here's how one baseball team that orders with us each year does this as their primary fundraiser.  In 2009 they ordered 500 extra pins.  The coach proudly told us his players had raised well over $5000 last year, $7800 to be exact.  They ordered 1000 pins in February and had the extra fundraising pins sold by the end of March.  The other 500 were for pin trading at the world series.

He asks each of his players & families to be responsible for selling 25 of the fundraiser pins, or buying the pins themselves if they don't want to bother with selling them.  Some people don't want to mess with it.  Anyway, this way each family contributed at least $250 to the fundraising effort, and whether they want to sell or buy the pins is up to them.  This keeps the fundraising effort/contribution semi-fair amongst the families.  The coach does not limit how many team fundraiser pins they can sell however.

He offers great prizes like a new bat of their choice, a glove of their choice, a bucket of balls, etc. to reward his 'high fundraising' players.  He made up a simple prize sheet, with pictures of the six prizes for the top six 'sellers'.  He paid for the prizes after all the pins had been sold with the money that was raised.  He offered about $1000 in prizes.  He still cleared over $6000 for the team account this way, even after the cost of the 500 extra pins.  Plus, it didn't hurt that they got a much better 'price per pin' ordering 1000 instead of 500 pins.  THIS PAYS FOR EVERYTHING HIS TEAM DOES ALL YEAR.  If you choose not to offer prizes, you can keep more money in your account, but the kids will not be as motivated/competitive.

You're probably wondering, how did this team raise $7800 with just 500 fundrasing pins at $10 each?  Some of the kids wanted the prizes so much that they sold their world series trading pins too.  Funny, huh?  He had to call back and order some more pins so those kids had enough for pin trading.  Three things to take away from that 'problem'.

        1.) Hold back the world series pins from your kids until after the fundraiser
        2.) Offering good prizes really motivates most of the kids to try to sell them
        3.) Fundraiser pins are a very easy way to raise team funds.

Some of his players wanted to "win the free bat or glove" so badly that they sold their world series pins as fundraiser pins and just planned to order replacements later.  The coach also told us, that once someone said 'yes' and agreed to buy a fundraiser pin, his more successful kids would ask the person, "How many would like?".  Quite often the person would buy more than one.

So, try it first yourself with just 50 or 100 extra pins on your team order.  If it works for you this season - order more or even try a whole fundraiser next season.