Eyisha had never run a fundraiser like this in her life. She’s a booster parent, not a development director, and like everyone who goes looking for booster club fundraising ideas that actually work, she started with a season number that made her stomach drop. A few months ago she stood in a school room with a hand-painted thermometer on the wall, a microphone, a bell, and about 100 football players crammed across 25 tables. Ninety minutes later her club had raised roughly $45,000. I got to talk with her about exactly how it happened. Here’s what she figured out.
First, the number, because it’s the part nobody believes. Eyisha walked into that night already holding about $11,000, since families who’d be out of town had given early. By the time the room cleared they were near $55,000, against a season goal of $85,000 built across 130 kids. They left the donation link open another week and got there too. One Tuesday night did the bulk of a year’s fundraising. All of it came in as donations, paid online.
What Eyisha would tell you first
Ask her what mattered most and she doesn’t pause: the head coach. The boys spend every week with their coaches and respond to them in a way they will never respond to the team moms. When the head coach told the team this mattered and put his staff at the tables to work the room, Eyisha had leverage no parent volunteer can manufacture on her own. Without that, she said flatly, there’s no night. If you take nothing else from her, get your coach all the way in before you plan anything else.
Then she made the ask tiny. Every kid had one job: reach 25 people, ask each for $25. Small enough that a 15-year-old actually believes he can do it, and across 100 players it quietly becomes a fortune. And she didn’t spring it on them. Her group spent weeks sharing the plan and the infographics, and even ran little role-play demos in the weightlifting classes so the kids had said the ask out loud before the night ever came.
The part I love most: she built it as one team goal, not 100 lonely ones. Mixed grades at every table, shared prizes, tables racing each other to fill up first. When two freshmen couldn’t land a thing because they were only reaching broke classmates, their coach pulled out his own phone, got them on calls, and vouched for the kids himself. Nobody got to fail quietly in a corner. That’s also why the night doubled as the best team-bonding event of the year, which is the second payoff that never shows up on a budget.
And she respected the clock. The thing was billed as two hours, but the real work was capped at 90 minutes, because Eyisha knew that was the ceiling for a room full of teenagers. Pizza showed up at 7:30, they handed out prizes, and they ended on a high. Food, she said, is the only way you keep the boys in the room. Don’t fight that. Use it.
What the room looked like: a giant thermometer one mom painted by hand, filled in another band of red every time they crossed a thousand dollars. A bell that rang on every donation. A laptop with the running total. Tables competing as units, top table and top players taking home prizes. When a donor paid, they texted the kid a screenshot, the kid shouted it to the coach, the coach shouted it to the mom with the bell, and the bell rang again. Eyisha’s word for the whole 90 minutes: constant.
Why she ran it on SuccessFund
Yes, I’m the founder, so take this with the necessary grain of salt. But Eyisha ran her telethon on SuccessFund, and the line she kept coming back to was that she expected it to be hard and it just wasn’t. She’d never built a fundraiser online before. She set the whole thing up herself. And the one nudge the platform gave her turned out to be the piece of advice that mattered most: share the link, then share it again, then keep sharing it. She did, and the donations kept landing for a full week after the room had emptied.
Donors can pay with Venmo, not only a card, which matters more than it sounds when you’re asking a player’s aunt to give from her phone in 20 seconds. And that table-vs-table competition Eyisha ran by hand, the thermometer and the running total, is built into SuccessFund as a live leaderboard. You can put real-time standings up on the screen and let the room chase them. Keep the painted thermometer anyway. It was a great touch.
The head coach already signed up to run it again next year, which is about the best review I can give you.
If you take one thing from Eyisha
I’ve never been the one staring down a season’s fundraising number with a handful of parents who already have full lives. I can only imagine what that pressure feels like. Eyisha lived it, so I’ll take her word over any checklist, and the truth is it isn’t a checklist anyway. What carried her club was four plain things: she got the coach all the way in, she gave every kid one small real thing to do, she made it one team chasing one number, and she kept sharing the link long after the room had emptied. The software is the easy part. Go to SuccessFund, create a campaign, and click around for ten minutes. It’s free, there’s nothing to commit to, and you’ll understand the whole thing faster than you would reading another word about it.
If you’re on a booster board right now staring at this year’s number, forward this to the group before the next meeting. One night carried Eyisha’s club most of the way to its $85,000 season goal. If you want to look under the hood first, see how a telethon runs on SuccessFund.
And when you start planning one and hit a specific wall, how to split the tables, what to set as the per-kid goal, what to do with families who’ll be away, ask it in the SuccessFund community forum. Odds are another booster parent already solved exactly what you’re about to run into, and they’ll tell you what really happened on the night.