Trading pins & custom lapel pins!

Fundraising pins to the extreme:   This is a $5000+ fundraiser idea for your team using fundraiser pins.  How well does it work... pretty darned well for some teams each year.  Metro Pins has several teams that order early from us each year and they do this or something very similar.  Here's an example of how one ball team that orders with us does this as their primary fundraiser.  They ordered 500 extra pins for fundraising.  The coach proudly told us that his players raised well over $5000 doing this, $7800 to be exact.  They placed their order for 1000 pins, 500 of which were for fundraising.  The other 500 were for pin trading at the world series.  This had the added benefit of lowering their unit price per pin.

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 contributes at least $250 to the fundraising effort, and selling or buying 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 either.

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 'pin 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.  This pays for everything this coach's team does all year.  If you choose not to offer prizes, you can keep more money in your account, but of course it does help get the kids motivated & competitive.

WHAT?  You're probably wondering, how did this team raise $7800 with just 500 fundraising pins at $10 each?  Some of the kids wanted the prizes so much that they sold their world series trading pins too.  Kind of comical 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 good 'problem'.

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

A few 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 you like?".  Often the person would buy more than one.