You Do Not Have It Covered: 20 Tasks for Volunteers

Sometimes a volunteer catches you flat footed. “You guys need anything? Can I help out?” There’s certainly a lot that you, a booster club leader, need to do. You could use some help. To-do lists are so tightly spooled in your head it feels like they’re going to start fluttering out. Yet it feels like more effort to train this volunteer than to do things yourself. You’re tempted to tell them that you have it covered, or that there’s nothing small enough for them to take on. Don’t give in. Do … [Read more...]

Booster News: Booster Club Loses Nonprofit Status

Booster clubs can lose non-profit status with the IRS. A recent Forbes article brought this to our attention again, highlighting an IRS ruling from late August. “Capital Gymnastics operated in a manner that allowed substantial private inurement,” said the ruling. “[Capital Gymnastics] promoted private, non-public interests.” How did Capital Gymnastics ruin it’s 501(c)(3) status? Using a point system. Parents who didn’t want to fundraise paid, while other parents did collective fundraising … [Read more...]

Does your help hurt?

Creating Dependency In developing countries, aid programs give things and services. They compensate for the state’s shortcomings in education, food, or shelter. I was reminded of this by a Forbes article which highlighted the failures of an NGO in Eastern Europe. By pursuing the classic charity model--giving locals things they didn’t have--the NGO created dependency on their services (mostly clothing and food programs). They choked development. Recognizing this, the NGO switched gears. Instead … [Read more...]

Booster Club Officers

Chairperson? Officer? Here are booster club board member responsibilities. In this post, I take a look at the most basic and most specialized booster club officer positions. Maybe you are starting a booster club and you’re asking yourself “how many officers do I need?” Maybe you are joining a booster club, and you’re asking yourself “what do all of those titles mean?” Think of the booster club officer positions less as people and more as collections of responsibilities and skill-sets. They need … [Read more...]

Kill Bad Fundraisers

Sometimes fundraisers stop generating value. Good booster clubs must know when to kill them. Behind the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream factory lies a peaceful graveyard of discontinued flavors. Marked by grey headstones, they sit memorialized on a windswept carpet of fallen leaves. These ideas were put to rest after they ran their course, buried but remembered. For Ben and Jerry’s, the graveyard’s humor suits their quirky brand image, a kind of anti-corporate, self-deprecating humor engraved in the … [Read more...]

5 Ways to Help Your Booster Club—After the Fundraiser

How do you help a booster club aside from fundraising? If there isn't a fundraiser or a concessions shift open, what are you supposed to do? These 5 tips are for booster club supporters who are not sure how to help. Board members will have no problem finding work for themselves (see #3). But I hope they can pass some of these suggestions on for that volunteer who doesn't have a role yet. 1) Drive Students: I know school budgets often don’t cover transportation. Many clubs end up spending a lot … [Read more...]

How Good Record-Keeping Saves Nonprofits from High-Turnover

Watching the 2000 film Memento again, I realized that high-turnover volunteer organizations such as booster clubs suffer from serious amnesia. In the film, 30-something Leonard can’t create new memories because of brain trauma suffered during an assault. Imagine a person who can’t remember the lessons of the past, or the opportunities set to present themselves in the future. Lacking a system of good record-keeping, that’s the situation of most booster clubs. In Memento, Leonard compensates for … [Read more...]

Mission to Metrics 4: Promote Interest in Academics

Academic booster clubs seek to inspire more than high grades. The booster club I’m profiling in this post is more concerned with promoting interest among their participants than a perfect GPA. Grades aren't even mentioned in their mission statement. As with the other posts in the Mission to Metrics series, I show how booster club officers can develop appropriate metrics to measure the goals outlined in their mission statements. (See the intro post to metrics, and links to the other posts in … [Read more...]

Mission to Metrics 3: Beyond GPA & Winning (Sports)

Athletic booster clubs value winning on the field and in the classroom. How can they show it? I sometimes question why extracurriculars, particularly athletic programs, feel the need to justify their existence based on participants’ grades. After all, sports teach us how to work with teammates, make friends, adjust strategy on the fly, lose gracefully, and win gracefully. Perhaps that’s why some schools are actually lowering GPA standards for athletes, so as not to alienate struggling … [Read more...]

Mission to Metrics 2: Cooperation, Theater, and Auditing

A closer look at metrics, for a theater booster club that values cooperation. (The introduction to this series is called “Why Booster Clubs Need Metrics”.) Most booster clubs have non-financial goals such as creating cooperation or community involvement. Since non-financial goals require an accounting alien to the standard budget report, relevant metrics may not be intuitive. In this post, I take the mission statement of a theater club and show how to translate it into core objectives like … [Read more...]