High School Pizza Fundraisers

The parents hate them, but high school pizza fundraisers are an important part of an overall fundraising strategy to make trips and projects and proms and athletic teams and every other proprietary adolescent passage possible. It's possible that the reader has opened the front door to be propositioned with knockoff pooper scoopers, brooms, fruit and glow in the dark mailbox markers, but nothing quite raises those big bucks for the big ticket items like good old fashioned high school pizza fundraisers. Touch an American's love for the stomach and success is just around the pizza oven. However, many people do not know the arithmetic and the process that is behind this kind of money maker. And there are other options for the parents and school staff to mull over, like the discount card fundraiser. After all, the bottom line is that in many locations the parents and the school staff is the driving force behind most schools' efforts to build up the coffers for the various club or team treasuries.

Take for example, the fictional Tomato Plant High, located in the sunny southwest. Since the football team has not won a game for six years (they are always getting squashed by the other team), the father of the star quarterback figures its time that the team has new uniforms and helmets for the upcoming season. He has already resigned himself to the fact, after watching his son play, that the only hope the team really has to break the winless streak will be to have helmets so shiny and uniforms so white that the brilliance will somehow blind the other team. The father's search begins for the perfect money maker to raise the eight thousand dollars needed for the football equipment. The desperate man has concluded that the only two viable options are high school pizza fundraisers, or a discount card fundraiser, or perhaps both.

The students themselves had stopped going to the Tomato High football games because of the losing streak. They had resorted to spending Friday nights watching hubcaps rust and listening to each other's food digest. The father understood that the money making effort would have to come mostly from the team members, cheerleaders and their parents and a few community members who liked going to the games and promptly falling asleep. It would be a tough sell. The father's research told him that there were several ways to make money through the strategy of having high school pizza fundraisers. "Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered." (Psalm 32:1)

A local pizzeria offered the most promising plan. The owner suggested that on three of the slowest weekly business nights, customers could bring in coupons passed out by the team members and cheerleaders to receive fifty percent off all food items except beverages. In addition, the owner offered the father the opportunity to sell pizza coupons in twenty dollar denominations, and when the customer came in and used them at any time, the team would receive twenty five percent of the coupon's value. These ideas sounded really good, but the local pizzeria had just had a run in with the local health Board. These ideas were put on hold. There had to be another way high school fundraisers could work, so the father researched a frozen idea through a national corporation.

Frozen pizza in three sizes and five different toppings with fifty percent profit was appealing to the father. The national company offered not only pizza but cheesecake and cookie dough in five flavors. Even the cheesecake and cookie dough items offered large percentage profits. Of course, the fly in this ointment was that the team and the cheerleading squad would have to get out and really sell door to door. When the cheerleading squad was offered new cheer outfits, the squad got really excited and began boasting how the ten of them would outsell fifty five guys on the football team. When the fundraising committee, headed by the desperate dad ordered a sample pack of the products, reviews were mixed on the quality of the products. The cheerleaders were excited, but the football team knew in their heart of hearts that shiny helmets weren't going to help, and some of the big linemen were too shy to go door to door asking for sales commitments to pizza more akin to cardboard.

The committee reevaluated the situation by considering another alternative. Its members began researching a discount card fundraiser. This strategy employs the participation of at least ten area businesses that agree to give a discount when the card is presented at the businesses advertised on the card. The card is typically small enough to fit in a wallet. The committee really perked up when the group heard that up to ninety percent profit could be made on such an enterprise. They were advised to purchase plastic cards about the size of credit cards to ensure long term durability for the customers that bought them. In the end, because of still having to go door to door and the cost of making plastic cards, a discount card fundraiser didn't seem to get anybody excited quite like the pizza did.

The team and the cheerleaders decided on one of the high school pizza fundraisers already presented to them. The decision was to go with the local pizzeria's ideas. All the team and squad had to do was pass out discount coupons downtown for three weeks. The students of the high school even got in on the action, until a real smart one decided to go the neighboring high school four miles away and asked the football team to take pity on the Tomato High team. The student actually asked the other team to come and participate in some Saturday "pass out the coupon" efforts. The rivals stole all the coupons the kid had and burned them in front of the pizzeria.

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