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Online printing is one of the best resources available to booster clubs. The use of online printing extends far beyond simple business cards or professional flyer printing services. Depending on the needs of your booster club, you may find that some online printing companies can help to meet your desired goals.
You can use online printers to:
These listed resources below are all great options when it comes to online printers for booster clubs!
VistaPrint is one of the more unique and famous online printing companies. They are famous for offering great deals on their personalized products, especially their business cards.
They handle a wide variety of different printing needs, have reasonable prices, and they often offer free shipping and discount codes or sales that make their prices even better!
Using VistaPrint to make your booster club’s business cards can be a great way to promote your group when you are out and about.
Another great option is using them to create car magnets to that show your support for your booster club. This not only helps to promote the group but also helps to increase the booster club spirit within the community.
4imprint is another one of our favorite online printers for booster club promotion because they offer a nice variety of personalized items, and can place your booster club name or logo on just about anything. They also have a pretty fast shipping speed so that last-minute orders may be received on time.
Consider using 4imprint for placing your booster club logos or quick contact information on ballpoint pens as a great way to promote your booster club. Simply hand out pens for free at events or when someone is in need. This can be a great passive form of promotion in just about any setting.
Promo Direct offers a wide range of products from personalized candy to office supplies. According to their website, they are the #1 promotional products store which could explain why we here at Booostr love them so much.
With low prices and great shipping, this website is a good place to get a lot of printed orders completed and stay within budget and deadlines.
Ordering colored lanyards in the school colors and having booster club information printed on them can help to distinguish volunteers at events. This is perfect for helping guests to know who to come to ask questions and advice on a subject matter.
With a smaller budget, comes a need for cheaper products to sell or give away through forms of booster club promotion.
As the name implies, DiscountMugs offers discounted prices as well as personalized mugs. They also offer other items ranging from t-shirts to office supplies and lawn chairs.
How cool would it be to make and sell booster club folding chairs at your next football game? Not only could it be a great fundraiser, but it’d be unique and memorable!
With low costs, and this online printing company doing all of the manufacturing for you, all your booster club needs to do is promote the chairs and sell. Which, shouldn’t be too hard as many people enjoy sitting in folding chairs during a sporting event instead of on the grass.
Besides the initial membership fee, the second most popular booster club fundraiser is typically the apparel sales. Many people will buy a booster club t-shirt or sweater because it helps to support the booster club and it’s a useful item that will get a lot of good use.
Choosing an online apparel company can be tricky though. There are a lot of small variables to consider.
Some online apparel companies offer:
When you look for an online apparel company, it’s important to keep these variables in mind and make a list of which ones can best help your booster club with its goals. When you can do that, you can know exactly which company is right for you.
Still not sure where to get started? Check out these online apparel companies that we love, and that you might love too!
Custom Ink is by far the Booostr club’s most favorite online apparel company. They offer a ton of great options that really help to make the entire fundraiser more effortless and less stressful on your part.
It’s no wonder that we have given it a rating of 5 out 5!
Custom Ink is a one-stop-shop for creating a design and selling it. With their creation program, you can make any design or upload your own. Not only that, but the minimum purchase requirements for screen printing is pretty low. While you only need to order 6 shirts, they do offer deals for fewer shirts, and lower prices for more “bulk” orders.
What makes them even more amazing than other printing companies is that you can have the shirts printed and shipped directly to you or you can sell the shirts online straight from their website and never have to worry about inventory!
I know, we just listed this same company above with the online printing section, but honestly, they’re great at t-shirt printing too!
In fact, we’ve given them a rating of 3.5/5 for t-shirt printing!
What makes them so great with t-shirts is that they do not offer a minimum purchase requirement and the prices naturally start out much cheaper than with other companies. While you do have to pay for shipping, most orders arrive within 10 business days of being placed.
The downside of Vistaprint is that it has a difficult shirt designing process making it much easier to upload an already completed design rather than to create one on their platform.
With a Booostr rating of 3 out of 5, Cafepress makes it into our top 5 apparel printers online.
Although they can do many other printed products for your booster club, their t-shirt design process is fairly simple and easy to understand. The website allows you to design your image and apply it to shirts with just the click of a few buttons.
While the prices are pretty average when compared to other printers, there are bulk order discounts, coupons, and other special offers to help lower the pricing.
We gave this website a Booostr rating of 4.5 out of 5.
They definitely chose the right name for their company because you can go from designing a shirt to having it in your hands in about 2 weeks!
What makes them amazing is that their prices for shirts are all-inclusive. This means that there are no hidden fees or shipping charges to worry about. Everything is as simple as it gets when it comes to math, making it very easy for your booster club to budget with.
Not only that, but they also offer discounts for nonprofit groups like your booster club!
One of the best t-shirt printers is UberPrints, and we give them a rating of 4 out of 5!
With no minimum purchase requirements for screen printed shirts and only a 12 minimum purchase requirement for embroidered shirts, you can easily order what you need.
Their shipping charges are affordable and in some cases, even free! Another added bonus is that the production and the shipping time are both incredibly fast.
Not only are they naturally affordable for the booster club on a budget, but they also want to help you to save even more money. They offer an entire page dedicated to sharing money-saving tricks on their website.
While not every booster club member is technologically savvy. There are several options for creating a website that can be incredibly user-friendly.
Having a booster club website is a fantastic way to branch into the 21st century with your booster club. With so many different individuals using smartphones and the internet every day, having your booster club’s own website could help you to be found on both a local scale as well as global.
Some of the benefits of having a booster club website are:
Depending on your website host of choice, you may even find that you can turn your booster club’s website into an additional revenue maker.
While websites might feel tricky at first, and there is a learning curve that comes with them, there is a lot that is made easy thanks to website hosts. Check out our favorite website hosts below!
Squarespace is a great website for small companies, individuals, and nonprofits. With nonprofits, they offer special pricing packages as well as advice to help increase donations to your booster club as well as steps to help manage the donations.
When you have a merchant account linked with Squarespace, you can set up a special donation button on your website so that visitors can donate any amount when they want.
Besides the ease of receiving funds, Squarespace makes it easy to set up and design a website with their custom-built themes that you can adjust to fit your booster club branding.
Weebly is an easy (and pretty straightforward) website hosting option. With different themes, widgets, editors, and drag and drop elements that you can use to custom create your own web pages, you can have a unique booster club website.
Weebly is known for how easy it is to use. It’s perfect for those beginners with little to no technical experience.
It’s also mobile responsive. This means that when website visitors visit from their smartphones (as most will), they’ll be able to view your site in a great format fit for their screen size.
The best part is that Weebly starts out with a free pricing plan and works its way up to $12 a month for the pro plan, making it an affordable option.
Another great website builder is Wix because of it being a free web host and website builder in one. It’s easy to navigate and offers easy templates and guides to help create the perfect website. No coding experience necessary.
It also gives you an easy preview of everything that you’re doing so that you know what it will look like once it’s published on your site.
While there are plenty of theme templates to choose from, the downside of Wix is that if you want to change the theme later, you will have to reinsert all of your content.
The pricing is decent and low with there being a free plan, and paid plans ranging up to $14 a month.
If you are very serious about your booster club website and want to create a stream of revenue or have options to change the website as time progresses, WordPress is the best choice.
Not only is it straightforward to understand, but it also offers a ton of templates and plugins that can help to create the perfect user experience with little to no coding knowledge. There are even well-detailed articles that can answer almost any question that you may have about WordPress.
The only downside of WordPress.org is the pricing as it starts out at $2.99 a month and can go up to their Premium package of $8.25 a month. Making it one of the more expensive options available.
Having social media channels for your booster club is very important. These days almost everyone has an account on at least one social media channel.
By harnessing these social media channels to aid your booster club, you can do more than gain “likes” and “shares” on posts. You can increase your booster club efforts and so much more.
For example, by creating social media accounts for your booster club, you can:
While social media channels are great, we really recommend that you either:
Each social media channel has its own algorithm in place for getting seen, and there can be a learning curve with each. By choosing to focus on only one or two at a time, you can master them and do better than if you were to divide your time among multiple at once.
Not only that, but each social media channel is different, and each one can help your booster club differently.
Check out these social media channels that we recommend below to see how they can help your booster club today!
Facebook is the top social media channel of choice for booster clubs because of their versatility. With Facebook, you can create closed groups for volunteers and students; this can be a great way to share tips, advice, and event details with a select few. You can also create a business page for your booster club so that you can publicly post about different events or fundraisers. Both can directly link back to your booster club website as well.
Effectively using your Facebook page for your booster club can be a little tricky at first as Facebook algorithms choose to display posts based on user engagement. So getting more views means that you need to get more clicks, likes, and shares. You may even find that your audience is more responsive at different times of the day, or different days of the week. By using your Facebook data and insights, you can effectively create a great campaign to get your booster club posts seen.
Twitter is one of the top leading social media channels. Almost every celebrity has a Twitter account, and you hear about feuds or gossip being fueled by a Tweet. Beyond the celebrity gossip, Twitter can do much more for your booster club. While the downside of Twitter is that they limit your characters, meaning every post must remain short- it’s actually a great way to get your message read by people who are scanning the page as they scroll through their feeds.
Not only that but with Twitter, you can find and follow other booster clubs or like-minded organizations. This allows you to connect and share ideas with each other, growing your followers, and getting your message to an even bigger audience.
Twitter is definitely a great way to market your booster club to a wide range of people and give real-time updates.
Instagram works differently than many other social media channels because it’s mostly based on hashtags and pictures. You want the content shared to be short, searchable, and eye-catching. Due to this, there is a learning curve as you grow in followers.
Properly running a booster club Instagram page can be beneficial because you can share photos of fun events or fundraisers and show the community exactly what your booster club does for the school.
Sharing photos from your recent car wash or reminding everyone to buy a ticket to the next dance can both help to increase booster club involvement or recognition.
One of the social media channels most geared towards the younger generation is Snapchat. While it is unlike the other social media platforms, it has a few added benefits for your booster club, including that it can help to reach your students.
Snapchat is known for their fun photo filters and their unique newsfeed system. Every post that you make to Snapchat disappears (gets erased) after a few hours. This means that whatever your message says needs to be relevant or not too time-sensitive.
By sharing fun filtered photos from events or giving short posts, you can engage with a younger crowd and get more student involvement with your booster club.
Online fundraisers are a massive success with booster clubs when they are running properly. After the initial planning and research, online fundraisers become easier to run as time progresses.
There are many different kinds of online fundraisers that your booster club could be taking part in. These include:
With so many different ways to earn money online, your booster club could take part in several different online fundraisers at the same time.
Online fundraisers are a huge success nowadays, thanks to how many people are glued to their phones and the internet. It takes almost no physical effort on behalf of the donor, making it about as convenient as possible for them.
Check out these amazing online fundraising websites and possibilities for raising additional funds for your booster club!
One of the top leading websites for nonprofits to do online fundraising is Chuffed. They have an easy to navigate website that makes it simple for customizing designs that highlight your booster clubs campaigns and sharing them over social media.
While they are better geared towards specific campaigns, your booster club can still make the most of this site. For example, you can have a campaign set to raise money for new field equipment for your team or to fund a field trip to a real orchestra concert.
The best part about Chuffed is that the donor covers all of the processing fees, so everything that the club raises is theirs. No additional fees to worry about!
Donate Kindly is a great way to accept donations to your booster club. With their easy to use integration system, you can have a call-to-action button placed on your booster club website so that people can donate money whenever they want. This is a great way to make a passive income for the booster club as it is a “set it, and forget it” type of fundraiser.
Unlike other fundraisers that require you to drum up attention continually, this one is just sitting on your site, doing its job. Not only that, but every donor will have their information stored and can set up reoccurring donations to help fund your booster club all year long.
Pricing for this company varies as you can start with the basic free version or upgrade to the $99 annual fee for their full-feature version.
Fundly has a better visual appeal. As opposed to donation websites that are mostly text related, explaining this or that. Fundly is more reader-friendly. With bright high-def images and videos, it’s able to mimic the appeal of social media platforms, which is a great way to engage younger donors.
Fundly allows you to create money-raising campaigns and then share the campaigns across social media platforms such as Facebook. Not only that, but Fundly shows your fundraiser to other website viewers, so you can reach even more people with every campaign!
The downsides are the fees. There is a flat 4.9% fee for using the platform and a 2.9% processing fee for credit cards, plus an additional $0.30 per transaction.
OneCause is an online charity auction website geared towards helping to promote your booster club. Using them to promote and raise funds is a great idea.
They have cloud-based software, and can do much more than auctions and can actually help you to have text-to-give campaigns as well as mobile bidding, ticket sales, and more. They really are a great website for doing your booster club online fundraising.
The best part is that their pricing is based on a tiered system depending on the level of support and services that you will need. So you never have to worry about paying for features that will go unused!
Shopify is one of the most well-known shopping platforms online, and that’s probably because of how easy it is to get it up and running. It’s basically an online store that you set up and can then advertise anywhere online, which is made even easier with Shopify’s social media sharing capabilities. (It works well for Pinterest, Facebook, and Amazon).
While you do have to pay to use the Shopify website for your booster club’s store, you can also have it set up to dropship your products and merchandise. This means that people can buy from your booster club online, and then the item is made and shipped directly to them without you ever having to worry about inventory. Just set it up with Merchify, and you can create booster club designed products that are made to order.
Booster clubs are almost entirely based around the financial needs of the student programs. While there is much more to a booster club such as increasing school spirit and providing student and teacher aide, the finances are what help to keep the programs up and running in most cases. Therefore, it makes sense that a booster club would have strong needs for an online accounting system that can meet all of their needs.
Creating a system for the booster club that can keep track of all of the incoming and outgoing money as well as the sources is a great way to stay ready every year at tax time. Having everything neatly organized keeps your accountant, treasurer, and booster club in-the-know about finances and saves them from hours (or days) of struggling to put together financial documents at the last minute.
Here is a list of the top 5 accounting programs that Booostr recommends!
QuickBooks is top-rated virtual accounting software that you have no doubt heard of at one point or another. With it being such a popular site, you can easily find answers to questions online with any simple search if you can’t find the answers on their own FAQ page.
QuickBooks is great for serving nonprofit organizations and has a great 501c3 accounting software that your booster club could need to maintain accurate financial records.
With the different packages offered by Quickbooks, make sure that you choose the one that best fits your booster club needs.
Don’t worry though, if you select a package and later decide it doesn’t meet your needs and that you need to upgrade, QuickBooks makes it easy to do that too!
Unlike QuickBooks, Aplos was originally created and designed with nonprofit organizations in mind. This means that they have an excellent software system for nonprofit booster clubs. Not only that, but they are also very user-friendly. With many booster club volunteers not being a professional tax accountant or professional finance person, it is helpful to find accounting software that anyone can easily learn to use.
With different Aplos software packages available, you can choose the one that best fits the needs of your booster club and choose to upgrade later if your booster club’s needs change. Packages start out at $23 per month.
While Zoho wasn’t originally designed for nonprofit organizations, it was created for small businesses, and therefore a lot of features can transfer between the two. It is very user-friendly, making it great for people without an accounting background or that aren’t very familiar with accounting software.
The package plans for Zoho are both fairly reasonable at as low as $12 a month. The packages are run on a tiered system, and the next tier up from the lowest plan is $20 a month. It’s important to look at all of the features inside this accounting programs packages as they all vary. You may find that you don’t require much and that you can do just fine with their free package option.
The FastFund nonprofit platform is perfect for the booster club on a budget. With a FastFund accounting software having pricing packages ranging from their free option to their multiple paid packages ranging from $38-$85 a month.
The FastFund accounting software has accounts payable and receivable as well as cost allocation, which can be great for helping to diversify the booster clubs income and outgoing money. With their payroll functionality and fundraising donor management, you can pay companies as needed, such as vendors for events or keep track of your high paying donors.
This accounting software pretty much has all of your booster clubs met and then some, but double-check that the needs of your club align with the features before committing to buy.
TurboCASH can be found in two versions, the TurboCASH4 and the TurboCASH5, the latter will cost you money while the former is free. The differences are pretty numerous but depending on your booster club needs. You may find either one to meet or exceed your expectations.
Both help with managing cash, sales tax and invoicing but for as low as $60 a year you can have TurboCASH5 do even more for you. Budgets, projections, payroll, and organizing banking documents or information. The paid version also comes with an accounting made easy tutorial for walking you through what you need to know.
With there being so many different local and federal laws in place for booster clubs, it’s essential to make sure that your club is following them all to a T. Due to different states having their own laws in place, this section will only list the federal laws that affect all booster clubs. For a more in-depth look at the laws regarding your state’s booster clubs, check out our booster club index and click on your state.
Booster clubs have to obey so many different rules that govern the way that they are created, ran, the way they do taxes and the way that they disperse their funds. With so many different rules and laws in place, it can be tricky trying to keep track of everyone. Not only that but new bills and laws are introduced all the time, so staying up to date is incredibly vital for ensuring that your booster club is running legally.
As a 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization, your booster club has to fill out the IRS Form 1023. Forms, as we know, can be confusing, and require a legal background to fully understand what they are talking about.
We like this instructions pdf because it helps to explain everything that a nonprofit needs to know as you incorporate your booster club into the legal system.
This instructional packet includes details about when to file and information about the legal boundaries that your booster club must stay within, such as not intervening with a political campaign. Having this pdf handy can help to make sure that your booster club’s legal questions can be answered quickly and correctly.
Applying for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) is great for booster clubs because it helps it to function legally. EIN’s are numbers assigned to every business, whether they employ people or not. It’s basically like a social security number for your organization. The government uses it to track your booster club’s legal activities.
Other names for EIN could be Federal Employer Identification Number (FEIN) or Federal Tax Identification Number (TIN).
Having an EIN will be important for your booster club because it is needed in order to open a bank account, or if your state requires, you may even need to apply for a business license. Check out Booostr’s booster club index to see what legalities your state might require for your booster club!
One of the perks of being a booster club is being able to file for nonprofit status. A booster club is run for the sole purpose of raising money for the student program that it sponsors, so by definition, it is a nonprofit, but with the proper paperwork and forms filled out, it can be so legally.
Unfortunately with nonprofit status comes extra steps to ensure that your booster club is running legally, and if not you could face fines, removal of nonprofit status or another form of punishment as set by the IRS and Federal government.
This link of tax-exempt requirements helps to set a solid understanding of exactly what is expected of a nonprofit.
While not every booster club is going to want to earn money with grants, the option is there. Grants can require an extensive wait, possible rejection, and hours worth of work to apply and meet the requirements for being considered, but in the end, they could pay out well.
This link is important to us at Booostr because we believe that it’s important for booster clubs to consider applying for grants. The best way to figure out if grants are a good source of income for your booster club is by thoroughly researching the grants available and seeing if they can meet your current and future needs as a booster club.
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Booostr is the first booster club software platform with a connected set of tools designed to help booster clubs and nonprofits better manage their organization. From Communication, to Management, to Fundraising, Booostr's connected software improves booster club efficiency and allow them to focus on surpassing their goals.
