Discount cards are a great fundraiser, but can reduce your profits if you have to buy them from a large fundraising retailer. The heavy, plastic cards with huge franchise logos are nice, but a few computer savvy people with the right printer can make just as good professional looking card themselves and increase profits.
To start, you need heavy cardstock and printer ink, both of which can be donated by a local office supply along with lamination services for when your cards are complete.
Canvass your local businesses. Take along a form with a space to write the agreement, and get a manager’s or owner’s signature. Leave them a copy and keep one for your files. Different businesses will be willing to commit to different things – have a list of suggestions ready!
Possible things for businesses to donate include:
- 10% of total purchase (good for all sorts of shops, including clothing boutiques, auto parts stores and local hotels or car rentals)
- Specific dollar amounts off of services, such as $2-5 (good for low priced services offered by beauty salons, oil change locations, dry cleaners, and so on)
- Specific items with purchase (good for restaurants, ice cream or donut stores and sandwich shops – a free drink, dessert or ‘buy one get one half off’ discount always goes over well)
- Try to hit the seasonal or out of the way places (maybe a local bed and breakfast would appreciate advertising a ‘couples getaway special’ to increase off season business)
- Look for entrepreneurs willing to give a discount as well (doing taxes, estate planning, counseling, dog walking, cake decorating)
- If you are short on businesses, see what the members of your group have to offer. You could make one square be a free one time offer that can be punched with a hole punch when redeemed, and have members donate craft items that they have made.
Once you have gotten between ten and twenty businesses to sign off on offering discounts, work up the cards on a computer program, and print them out on one side of the cardstock. On the front do a logo with the name of your organization and telling what the sale of the cards benefits. Include an expiration date (usually a year away) so you can sell cards again in the future.
You can generally sell cards for $10 each, and many people will be happy to pay that in exchange for the discounts. Laminate the cards for extra durability, and trim them to fit in a wallet. This project may work so well you can repeat it yearly (you will need to get renewed permission from the businesses involved).
