Maximize Your Booster Club

Tips to excite your boosters about fundraising, helping your program succeed
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Fundraising. Lots of wins. New equipment. Playing time. Coaches and booster clubs have lots of things on their respective agendas and rely on each other to make them happen. For one side or the other, some aspects of the experience may be a bit distasteful. For some coaches, fundraising is a chore that distracts from team preparation. For some boosters, you can never win enough games.

Yet few successful high school football teams are built without great coaches and great boosters working in tandem. While most would agree that winning is the best way to excite the boosters, every team can’t win every game. You want to build a relationship with your boosters based on mutual respect and teamwork, and building on the tradition of the football program.

1. Involve your boosters in the culture of your program
All of the coaches with successful booster clubs we spoke to outline their philosophies to the booster club and involve them in the daily routine of the football program in a significant, meaningful yet non-intrusive way.

The result is boosters understand their support role and work as a team to raise the funds and provide the support needed to complement the program. None of the coaches we spoke with do a great deal of fundraising themselves, yet their boosters bring in substantial amounts of money because they’re vested in the program; they feel a strong sense of ownership.

2. Give your boosters a feeling of ownership
Once you establish the boundaries for your boosters, based on philosophies, and sell them on the team concept – it’s not about playing time for any one player - grant them a sense of ownership in your program.

Make sure your boosters can always communicate openly and honestly with you about the program. Everyone wants their son to play more, but coaches are less likely to hear those complaints when your boosters are fully involved as a team united behind your team.

Allow them to participate in team meals, or help you set-up or host team events where everyone – players, coaches, boosters and other friends of the program – participate.

Make sure they know where their efforts – and money – are going. If you can separate booster clubs by sport, more parents are likely to get involved to support their son. If you can’t, make sure boosters know what they can do to specifically benefit football.

3. Set ambitious goals and articulate them to your boosters
Boosters with a sense of ownership in your program will be eager to help you get what you need for success. Tell your boosters what you need – based on realistic goals – for your program, and listen to their ideas on how to raise the money.

Schools we spoke with used casino nights, golf tournaments, local discount cards and program book sales to raise money. More importantly, the boosters we spoke to made their ambitious ideas for how to raise money for the football program into reality by working hard and working together.

4. Involve your players at all levels
Boosters are program supporters who start off as son supporters. When they see the team concept’s ancillary benefits for their son – not playing time, but leadership skills, personal growth and pride – their excitement for your program increases.

Most schools we talked to mandate the players understand the importance of fundraising and get involved. Hoover High requires each student to sell a page of the game program – a 320-page program. Others involve the players in fundraising projects and make sure they understand the results – new equipment, new uniforms, team dinners.

Player involvement brings them closer to their parents and, more importantly, when your players believe in the team concept and working together for common goals, on and off the field, you have an advocate in the house of every booster whose also a parent.

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