Educational Insights Smencils Scented Pencils Bucket of 50

Draw" student attention with these gourmet-scented, environmentally friendly pencils. An alternative to wooden pencils, Smencils are made from 100% recycled newspapers -- you can even see the layers of newspaper when you sharpen them! They feature 10 scent-sational fragrances and are guaranteed to keep their wonderful aromas for up to two years. Includes 50 Smencils, individually packed in their own freshness tubes. Each measures approximately 7" long.

Need money and support? The best and most practical way to get it is to fund raise. Fundraisers are profitable, fun, and well worth the trouble of organizing. You may be raising financial support for relief during a calamity or a tragedy, or the funds may be intended to support a particular organization. Nonetheless, a fundraising event works just like any other fundraising activity since it aims to collect money during donations, although usually in exchange for a particular service or product.

Fundraising vs. Donation Solicitation

Fundraiser events are organized by various groups and kinds of people and organizations-from multimillion companies to small non-profit organizations, from ordinary individuals to people of power and influence. The idea here is that the revenue gained from the fundraising event will not be used for personal gain. So why are fundraiser events more preferred than donation solicitation? Many view donation solicitation as too aggressive. Also, contrary to what many may think, donation solicitation will take too much time and effort. A fundraising event is a one-time event. Soliciting donations, on the other hand, is a continuous process. Besides, how many donations will an organization need to receive in order to collect sufficient funds?

Fundraising - A Mutual Benefit

The advantage of fundraising events is the exchange for the monetary support donors will give. The donors do not simply give their money to the fundraising event - they give it because they are expecting something in return. And what they will get depends on what type of fundraiser event an organization or individual plans to hold.

For example, a popular fundraising event idea is the car wash fundraiser. People will give money to the fundraisers and in turn, the fundraisers will wash the car of the donors. Other popular fundraising events include benefit dinners, benefit concerts, bake sales, auctions, and benefit sporting competitions. In all of these endeavors, the fundraisers provide something for the money they will receive. A popular form of fundraising done today is the televised fundraiser, where celebrities encourage viewers to phone in their donation pledges. Those who phoned in will then deposit their pledges in designated bank accounts.

Making Profit

Of course, the services or products given at fundraising events are more expensive if compared to their normal prices. This is expected and acceptable - after all, fundraiser events are held with the purpose to gain revenue in mind. Generally, fundraising events are not the best place to look for a bargain, although there are some exceptions, such as when the fundraising event is an auction or a bargain sale.

Imagination - the Key to Fundraising Success

Forming the fundraising activity into an event not only dramatically increases the revenue. It can also spread awareness and interest, which are both important if the fundraising event is done for a sports team or for a particular advocacy. Hence, many do not consider pre-order fundraising as a fundraising event, since it is merely an activity which is done to collect funds and not an actual event. Holding a fundraising event is definitely more exciting and more dynamic, and can obviously attract more supporters and donors. Door-to-door fundraisers may be effective, but it is bland and lifeless. Fundraising events inject life to charity.

So use your imagination! Be creative and different. Stand out from the crowd and turn heads with your fundraising event. And as long as you remember to stay organized and to have fun, success should be at your fingertips.

Jessi McCafferty writes about fundraising and recommends the friendly folks over at http://www.easy-fundraising-ideas.com/ as a great resource for accurate information and profitable fundraising product ideas.

Easy Fundraising Ideas is the fastest growing internet based fundraising company in the country. With their legendary service and help, they make you the hero!

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Running a cookie dough fundraiser is done in pretty much the same way as any other pre-sell fundraiser. Your sellers would be armed with a product brochure and a pen and simply start showing the brochure. How much they sell for your organizations depends on at least one of two things, how much they are behind your cause and what you have in the way of incentives for sales that are made.

EVERYONE likes cookies and cookie dough. I love cookies, don't you? Both you and I would be hard pressed to think of even one person who does not like at least one flavor of cookie dough. Cookie dough when sold in a cookie dough fundraiser, seems to have more of an emotional impact on the sellers than candles or Christmas wrap! People just seem to get excited about it.

One of the first things that you should do before sending your sellers home with their cookie dough fundraiser brochures is spend a little time training them. Not everyone is a born salesman, but with proper preparation everyone can sell cookie dough.

Cookie dough will just about sell itself. All it needs is a little exposure to potential customers from your sellers.

1.) Smile

Teach your volunteers to smile when talking to customers. A smiling face always has more successful sales than one that does not smile.

2.) Eye Contact

Eye contact creates an intimacy between two people. Eye contact has been proven to be a significant factor in the persuasion process of sales. So teach your volunteers to look them in the eye when presenting their pitch.

3.) Use the word "Because"

There is a great deal of power in that word. It expresses a need, pulls on the heartstrings of your customer, and is a factor in making a sale. Teach your sales people how to make use of this word.

4.) Ask for the sale

Many times a customer will purchase if you simply use a statement designed to ask for the sale.

5.) Use a favorite item

Encourage your sales people to pick a favorite item and suggest it when selling.

Create a simple script incorporating each point above and rehearse with your volunteers until they are comfortable. Your cookie dough supplier may even have a preprinted script that you can use or adapt to your own needs.

A smile on the face, effective eye contact, a colorful brochure and the use of the word "because" to let people know about your needs, along with a simple and sincere request for the sale are key ingredients to producing cookie dough fundraiser sales. Teach these necessary components to your sales force and watch the sales rack up.

AIM Fundraising has been helping schools and non profit groups raise money with cookie dough for years. When done for the first time as a new fundraiser, most will double or more their previous sales the first time they do a cookie dough fundraiser.

Copyright (c) 2008 AIM Fundraising

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Smencil Scented Pencils - Grape

Draw student attention with these gourmet-scented, environmentally friendly pencils. An alternative to wooden pencils, Smencils are made from 100% recycled newspapers. You can even see the layers of newspaper when you sharpen them! The scentsational fragrances are guaranteed to keep their wonderful aromas for two years! Set includes 5 Smencils of the scent that you choose.

The number of homeless increases every day, rising at alarming rates over the past quarter. High unemployment leads to many families not being able to afford their housing - putting many more on the crowded streets. Unfortunately during the downturn many companies and people have cut back on their charity giving and contributions.

So here is an easy way to help: have a coat drive in your neighborhood. Rally your neighbors and friends to make a big difference. Plus get your kids involved and not only will it help but it will also be a fun family event. so here is what you do.

Have your children color a nice informative flyer that you will be buy on A Saturday morning to pick up any extra coats and shoes. Let them know they can just leave the coats and shoes out on their front porch. Then have your children place the flyers in all your neighbor's mail boxes about 2 weeks before your collection day.

Then on the Wednesday before your Saturday pickup; have your children place another reminder flyer that you will be by on Saturday to pick up the coats. Make the flyers fun and colorful and eye catching. Hopefully on that Saturday you should be able to find many coats and shoes left for you. And you will be pleasantly surprised to see how many people leave coats and shoes for you and how many you collect. You will probably need to get some neighbors to help as they all will not fit in your car. Or you can make this a multiple Saturday event or help several shelters.

Then on the following Saturday go down with all the coats and shoes to your selected homeless shelter and drop off the coats, toys and shoes. Take breakfast or lunch or dinner if you like. Even better take some books to read. Or some soccer balls or gloves, bat and baseballs or a football or any other game you might want to play. Feel free to take some paper and crayons and think of some creative crafts. The important thing is also to share some time with the people staying at the shelter. The little bit of time will go along way to helping them feel loved and better about themselves. If you like leave the sports equipment and toys or crafts with the shelter for the next guests to use also.

Also remember the guests at the shelter are constantly changing. If you had another coat drive the next month the chances are the people staying at the shelter will have changed completely. And you will have many new homeless families in desperate need for coats and shoes and blankets and books. You can never do too much and you can always find a new shelter to help or a new set of homeless families to help. The terrible economic news means two bad things - they are many more people in need of help and there are a lot fewer people helping and those who are helping are offering less help. Your neighborhood coat drive will mean so much or will mean more than ever.

Thanks for your help.

Boake Moore is an IT solutions salesman by trade and also founded a non profit coffee company called Mission Grounds Gourmet Coffee http://www.missiongrounds.com/ourphilosophy.php - the church coffee. It donates all its profits and proceeds to helping orphans and impoverished children. Helping orphans , the church coffee - can be found at Krogers. And its also the finest Tarrazu coffee coming from Costa Rica coffee.

http://www.missiongrounds.com

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Educational Insights Smencils Scented Pencils Bucket of 50

Draw" student attention with these gourmet-scented, environmentally friendly pencils. An alternative to wooden pencils, Smencils are made from 100% recycled newspapers -- you can even see the layers of newspaper when you sharpen them! They feature 10 scent-sational fragrances and are guaranteed to keep their wonderful aromas for up to two years. Includes 50 Smencils, individually packed in their own freshness tubes. Each measures approximately 7" long.

With the advent of social networking and the rise of online-based businesses, the opportunities for people to find careers around the world has greatly increased. Foreign language classes are commonly available for children as young as elementary school age, and it's not out of the ordinary for high-schoolers to want to spend up to a year as a study abroad student. The choices that face young people today are astoundingly diverse and exciting.

Transitions Abroad is both a print magazine, as well as an online portal that provides in-depth information on issues related to studying, living, and working abroad. In their surveys of American foreign exchange students, the following traits have been reported in significant percentages:

• Increased self-confidence
• Increased maturity
• Lasting impact on world view
• Enhanced interest in academic study
• Influenced subsequent educational experiences
• Reinforced commitment to foreign language study
• Helped foster a better understand cultural values and biases
• Influenced a desire to seek out a greater diversity of friends
• Continues to influence interactions with people from different cultures
• Acquired skill sets that influenced career path
• Ignited an interest in a career direction pursued after the experience

With these kind of life-changing properties, it is no wonder that so many young people want to spend time studying in a foreign country. However, such an experience can be very costly, and financial aid can be difficult to find. This presents a problem for many would-be adventurers.

Is It Really In You?

Before venturing down this path too far, however, the student needs to be sure he or she is ready to totally commit to this process. A two to three week program overseas can cost up to $6,000 itself, so the student needs to realize this is serious business. It is going to take hard work and great sacrifice to make this opportunity possible.

It is also important for a student to decide what kind of program will best serve his or her interests. While study programs have great value, perhaps a volunteer work program is a better fit. Or, maybe a church-oriented mission program would be appealing. Not everything has to be academically based. In fact, if you pick a non-academic type of program, you might find alternate means of funding. So, please do thorough research not only on where you want to go, but also what you want to accomplish. It could help you focus your efforts.

Step 1- Personal Commitment or "Digging in your Own Pockets"

I think that there are some preliminary steps that should be accomplished early in this process that will reveal just how serious the student is about making sacrifices for this adventure. If any of these suggestions turn the student off, I would question the decision to move forward.

Control Spending Habits

The first thing a student must do is look at his or her own spending habits. If a weekly movie, music downloads, clothes shopping, and other incidentals are a higher priority than the study abroad trip, saving thousands of dollars is going to be difficult. Therefore, the student will have to create a strict budget and slash those expenditures that will keep him or her from reaching the goal.

Sell Your Stuff

Secondly, it would be wise for a student to assess what items he or she could sell to earn money for the experience. Ebay and other online auction houses are a great way to unload un-used or unnecessary items and earn pretty good cash for them.

A garage sale, held at the right time of year, can also be lucrative. You might even get your parents to "donate" all the proceeds to your study abroad fund. Perhaps friends and relatives would also be willing to give you their belongings to sell and keep the money.

Trade Your Stuff Up

Next, I know this may sound like an unusual suggestion, but in this age of email and cell phones, it might actually prove very profitable. I think the student should embark on a "Red Paperclip" project. I wrote a blog post about this on Top School Fundraisers. In essence, the student would choose an inexpensive item of his or her own and attempt to trade it to friends, families, co-workers, fellow students, or anyone willing to trade something of slightly higher value for it. Once the first trade is made, the student will immediately try to trade the second item for something of yet a higher value still. And so on. Eventually, once the student has traded for a significantly valuable item, he or she can sell it for cash and put that toward the trip.

I lead a class of adults once that undertook this experiment, and one woman ended up making a trade for an old car that had the original chrome on it. She took the chrome off, polished it, and sold it on eBay for $1,300! All this money-making opportunity takes is a cheap item to start with and the courage to ask people to trade. Who knows how far you could take this?

Blog Your Way to RichesAnother way to generate some revenue is to learn how to blog for money. There are a number of websites that will instruct you how to "monetize" your blog. You may not get rich from doing this, but incomes of $50 to $60 per month are pretty easy to set up and don't require a lot of hard work. Just a little creativity and attention should get the job done. I would suggest looking at the websites called Problogger or Shoemoney for ideas.

Get a J-O-B

Ok, this is a boring one: find a job. Committing to a part-time job, if you haven't done this before, can be a major step. It can intrude upon your studies and your personal life. But, if you want this overseas experience badly enough, you might be willing to work a few hours per week. If you make $7 per hour and work 15 hours per week for 36 weeks (an average school year) you could earn $3,780.

In the summer, you could even earn more. If you plan far enough ahead, you could really take a chunk out of the total bill this way. You won't be doing anything glamorous for $7 per hour, but remember your goal. Of course, you can't spend any of this income. Put it right in the ol' savings account.

Discover more ways to fund your exchange student experience with study abroad scholarships at http://topschoolfundraisers.com/news/how-to-raise-money-for-your-high-school-study-abroad-experience-part-ii/

Author Jim Berigan is a former school principal who enjoys guiding schools with their fundraising efforts. He writes for the Top School Fundraisers blog at http://TopSchoolFundraisers.com/news which includes a variety of fundraising ideas for students, parents and teachers.

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