Pick the fundraiser by starting from the bill. Tournament entry, uniforms, field time, a travel weekend — the number decides which ideas can get there, and that arithmetic is the part most lists leave out.
Registration for the spring tournament closes in three weeks. Entry is $1,200, two nights of hotel for fifteen families, new keeper kit and a set of game balls. Call it $4,800.
The coach is somebody's dad. There is no booster club, no treasurer, and no line item — there are fifteen families who are already paying for cleats, gas and league fees, and a season that starts whether the money shows up or not.
This is the step that gets skipped, and it's the one that decides everything.
A product fundraiser pays you a share of what you sell. Take your share — the catalogs state it — and divide the amount you need by it. If your share is 40%, $4,800 means selling $12,000 of product. Across fifteen families that's $800 of cookie dough each, sold to the same aunts and neighbors they'd have asked anyway.
A car wash at $10 a car is 480 cars.
Those are good fundraisers. They are not three-week fundraisers, and they are not $4,800 fundraisers for fifteen families.
| What the team keeps | 100% of every contribution. The 6.9% fee is added at checkout and paid by the contributor, not taken out of what you receive. |
| When it arrives | Standard payouts reach the bank in 2-3 business days. |
| Who sees it | Only the people you send the link to, unless you choose to make it public. Nothing is listed or searchable by default. |
$4,800 is forty-eight contributions of $100.
Fifteen players have thirty sets of grandparents between them. Add the aunts, the uncles, the godparents, the family friend who comes to every home game. Forty-eight is not a stretch — it's the people already in the stands, and $100 toward a grandchild's season is a normal thing for a grandparent to give.
That's the same crowd the cookie dough was going to be sold to. This just asks them directly, for the actual amount, without the $12,000 of product in between.
Nothing to create a request. Nothing to send it. The only fee is the 6.9% a contributor pays on top of their own contribution — a $100 contribution costs the giver $106.90, and the team receives $100.00.
One specific bill with a number on it. "Spring tournament entry and travel, $4,800" asks better than "team fundraiser," because the grandfather reading it knows exactly what his hundred dollars is doing.
Teams that already have a roster. Fifteen families, and every family has people around it. That list is the whole requirement, and a team manager already has it in a group text.
A deadline. Registration closes, the uniform order has a cutoff, the tournament is in April. A season has hard dates.
Contributions start at $100. That's the scale this is built for — a grandparent covering a share of the entry fee, an uncle covering a hotel night. Forty-eight of them and the season is paid for.
Keep them on the calendar. They reach people your roster doesn't.
A request is for the bill that lands between them, with a date attached.
