Jake Lile
The most successful fundraiser our National Honors Society chapter has organized relied heavily on raffle tickets. I’ve been our school’s president for the past two years and we have done things ranging from selling chocolates to half time free throw competitions during basketball games. The coolest thing we’ve done so far however was our “Turkey Bowl”. It was Thanksgiving time; we were getting pretty close to break and all of us really wanted excuses to get out of class. We also needed to raise a few hundred more dollars for our National Honors Society. We came up with the idea to host a flag football game the last half of the day before break, yes partly eating up some class time but hey, you must do what you must do. We talked a bunch of our teachers into joining the game and then put them on teams with a mix of players from all four grade levels. Watching our 6’2” English teacher take out our hundred and ten pound business essentials teacher was pretty hilarious; mostly just for the apologizing afterwards.
So we create this “Turkey Bowl” but we had to figure out a way to make some money from it. One of our members came up with the idea to sell raffle tickets the preceding week to win one of five huge turkeys that they could then eat at Thanksgiving. We really didn’t have much time and there are not many people to ask to buy things in our small town of just over eleven hundred people. What we did find though was that it was much easier to sell people one dollar raffle tickets than thirty dollar boxes of chocolates. After selling tickets for only really three days, we made close to seven hundred dollars. This may not be a lot of money for other schools, but for our school, it was one of our most successful fundraisers of all time.
We held the drawing for the turkeys at half time while people from the community poured into the school to cheer their favorite team on. A couple of the winners weren’t present for the game, but we had written their phone numbers down on our sides of the tickets and were able to call them up later that day.
The “Turkey Bowl” was a huge success and a huge amount of fun. It was an opportunity to get our teachers involved with our students in something more fun than homework, and gave us the perfect excuse to get out of half a day of school. The best part of it all however is that thanks to all the raffle tickets we sold, we are now able to fully fund our National Honors Society trip. Unlike fundraisers we’ve had in the past, this one we didn't’ have to feel like bums going around the community selling people things. We found that people were eager to give when it was something as simple as a dollar. The Turkey