Theater in our schools month is full of great opportunities for your booster club and you are most likely missing out on them. With the proper planning and forethought, your booster club can use this month to do some unique school theater fundraisers and promotions. Bringing in more money to the extracurricular activity your club supports as well as promoting it are two things that you should want to do because it helps to better the student’s lives that much more.
What Is Theater In Our Schools Month?
Every year in March, theater in our schools happens. It’s a month-long promotional event that happens around the world and helps to educate and inform the community about theater and it’s importance.
Why It’s Important to Educate Others About Theater
As a booster club volunteer supporting your special performing arts program you should already be well educated on the importance of the programs and the impact that it has on students. You can see just how beneficial these clubs are and how much your students need the creative outlet. Unfortunately, not everyone else can see what you see.
Theater clubs are often one of the first things cut from schools when funding gets tight. Schools would rather focus and allocate money elsewhere to get test scores up, and it’s because of your theater booster clubs that these programs can continue to thrive despite these financial setbacks.
By educating and informing the school and local community of how important these programs really are, you can bring both awareness and emotional connections to the group which can help to bring in more money during fundraisers as well as more volunteers or members.
With theater in our schools month often going unnoticed, it’s important that your theater booster club can take part in it and exploit the month-long event as a way to set up annual drama program fundraisers and draw attention to your students.
By getting the local community and the school to form an emotional connection with the group, you can bet that your fundraisers will be much more successful as more people will be willing to donate and larger donations will be seen.
How To Raise Attention To Your School Theater Programs
By raising attention to your school’s theater programs you are helping to set your students up on a positive path that will lead them to future successes in life. As important as booster club fundraising is, getting attention pointed towards the clubs first can be the best way to help your fundraisers to be successful.
Here are some ways that you can promote your clubs with theater in our schools month.
Use Social Media
By now your booster club should have a social media account (or multiple) where you post about events and details to get likes, shares, and views. Use your already established booster club social media account to share stories, images, and video clips of your school theater programs or drama club and talk about how it is helping students to find their voices.
Share information about how your booster club is helping and supporting the clubs as well because that makes your group and the students all look good! Try to have a small post every day of the month to keep the attention and interactions happening. If you have to create a spreadsheet with reminders or planned things to say, do it. That can really help you to stay organized and to better plan your shared content.
Don’t forget to use hashtags in all of your social media content for the month. That not only helps to tie everything together, but it also helps to promote awareness for theater in our schools and brings in a larger and more diverse audience and traffic to your posts. People all over the world search hashtags on social media, so using them helps to get you seen by a larger target audience. Using a hashtag like #theaterinourschools is a great example!
Write To Your Local Newspaper Or News Station
Just like with social media, using your local news or newspapers can be a great way to promote your club, educate a large audience and maybe even drum up some attention for a theater in our schools fundraiser that your booster club is planning.
Make sure to include information about how the theater club is making a difference in your student’s lives and what it’s doing to improve the community as well. People will love to read about how the students are giving back!
Theater in Our Schools Fundraisers
Now that you’ve brought attention to your booster club as well as your theater programs you can set up drama club fundraisers to make money for the programs.
An important thing to remember is that it is a great idea to make a fundraiser an annual thing. By choosing to hold the same fundraiser every year, you are able to perfect it by learning from mistakes and adapting to changes being made. Every year that you host the event, it gets easier to plan, set-up, and execute. The community and schools also begin to look forward to it every year and grow in anticipation as the time approaches. This is a great way to drum up extra funds from the fundraiser!
A Pancake Breakfast
You can presell tickets to this event where the booster club makes and serves pancakes to everyone.
Restaurant Take Overs
This is an easier fundraiser as the restaurant often does most of the work. Work together with a local restaurant establishment and set up a day and time for your fundraiser. Have everyone come to your restaurant take over on the specified date/time and do whatever work your booster club is required to do (usually serving food or taking orders). It’s a fast fundraiser that is often very successful for both the booster club as well as the business.
Set Up A Donations Page
Using your booster club’s website you can set up a donations page for people to come and donate money as they please throughout the month. You can link to this page in your social media posts, mention it in a newspaper ad space, and remind people that it exists by handing out a few flyers during the month. It helps if you have a goal amount in mind so that people can feel like they’re helping you to achieve something rather than simply handing over money.
Pledge Sheets
Hosting an “a-thon” event or race where pledge sheets are used to collect money is a great way to get money from everyone. Have students and volunteers participate and everyone work together to collect funds. This is a great way to promote the clubs and bring in money.
Dinner and Silent Auction
Whether you choose to set up a formal fancy dinner and presell tickets and tables to guests or choose to be more casual about it, dinners and silent auctions are great ways to raise money.
Silent auctions can include different products donated by local community businesses, gift baskets, things donated by volunteers and more. Having a few “hot-selling” items on the list is also a great idea. Big-ticket items such as theater seats for an upcoming production or ad space on promotional products are something that many people would choose to buy and would bid on.
If your school theater programs have upcoming plays, auction off the best seats in the house or the entire front row. People will pay good money for good seats especially if their child is in the production.
Ad space in promotional flyers, playbills, and programs is a great way to entice businesses to bid and promote their company, but families can also bid and use this as a chance to congratulate their child or wish them good luck. You’d be impressed with how well this could sell.
With theater in our schools, your booster club can bring a lot of attention to important school programs as well as make a lot of money to help them. Don’t let this month go unnoticed. Plan a great fundraising and promotional strategy that can benefit everybody and try to create an annual event that everyone can enjoy.
