Morgan Fabrizio co-coaches cheer at Duchesne High and has to raise every dollar the program costs. Her answer is a serve-a-thon (one hour of community service per $250 raised) pointed at families, a tiered business-sponsorship program (~$20k/yr) pointed at local shops, and a portfolio of smaller fundraisers filling the gaps. The whole system: the service reframe, the sponsor ladder, the budget-first advice, and why the money comes from asking, not posting.
Morgan Fabrizio coaches the cheer team at Duchesne High School. Duchesne is a small Utah town, and because it's a place where everyone knows your name, every business gets hit up for donations by just about every sport's team at the high school. Even so, it's the thing that moves the needle most, so it's necessary. Why? Well, Morgan told me how surprised she was when she realized that the team needed to raise every single dollar required to run their program. Not most of it. Every dollar. That's pretty typical of high school extracurriculars, but not something that most people understand. Because the district doesn't hand a budget to a year-long program like cheer, if you want the season to happen, you go find the money. Local businesses proved to be her most powerful way to do that, but we talked about the bigger picture - the portfolio of fundraising they do, and why. One thing that impressed me, was how she modified the typical crowdfunding approach. She added a simple, yet meaningful layer, and she calls it: a serve-a-thon.
I wasn't sure what a serve-a-thon even was at first. My honest guess was "pay $250 and our cheerleaders will come babysit." It's not that at all. Once Morgan explained it, I understood why her fundraisers keep working year after year. Her squad is sixteen cheerleaders this season, though it has been as large as thirty, and the program runs all twelve months. She's built a whole approach to funding it, one that turns the ask into something her town actually wants to say yes to.
A serve-a-thon is a crowdfunding fundraiser where a team commits to community service in proportion to what it raises. At Duchesne, for every $250 the cheer team raises, the squad performs one hour of service, and each cheerleader owes an hour toward the total. Supporters give what they can, a grandparent chipping in twenty dollars counts the same as anyone, and Morgan's found plenty of people prefer it that way: "people like it because they don't always want to buy all the stuff that we're always trying to sell." The first year she and her sister coached, they ran a plain donation drive, and it worked fine. But it didn't sit right with them. As Morgan put it, "just as a moral, ethical thing, we felt like we just didn't feel right just asking for money." The serve-a-thon was the fix.
The service is real and it's local. Morgan's cheerleaders clean up the bleachers after every home game, clean Main Street twice a year, wash the windows of the businesses along it, and play the elves at the town's community Christmas celebration. Her team raised over $5,000 with the serve-a-thon this year and passed their goal, and they usually end up doing more service hours than the math requires. "It's just a way to give back and say thank you to our community for the support they give us," she said. The town isn't donating into a void. It's watching the kids it funded show up on Main Street with a bucket and a squeegee.
Cheer, drill, band, dance: these are not one-season sports with one big fundraiser. They run 12 months, and the costs come all year: competition entry fees, prop fees, safety clinics, uniforms, travel. Morgan doesn't fund that with one big event. She runs a small portfolio of fundraisers, each aimed at a different group of givers, so nobody in town is asked for everything. Her stack has a clear logic to it. The serve-a-thon is pointed at families, grandparents, aunts and uncles, the people who want to support a kid but have no use for advertising. The sponsorship program is pointed at local businesses. And a set of smaller fundraisers fills the gaps: a junior cheerleader clinic in the fall and again at the spring review, concessions at the junior high football games, and a self-pay amount from each family that covers the bulk of the season.
Each piece has a natural audience, and matching the ask to the audience is what has kept her from wearing out her town. Morgan learned early that the program was going to cost real money and none of it was coming from the school, which is how most high school extracurriculars work, so she built the whole system around spreading the ask instead of concentrating it. Her sponsorships alone bring in around $20,000 in a year (closer to $25,000 or $26,000 in years with more kids), and that's the workhorse. The serve-a-thon, the clinics, and the concessions round it out. Any one of them alone would leave a hole. Together they fund a season.
Morgan's sponsorship program is the biggest thing she does, and it hands the business something real in return. She builds tiered advertising packages, and the value climbs at each level. At $100 a sponsor gets social shout-outs on Instagram and Facebook plus a card to display at their business. At $250 they add their name on the back of a game-day shirt the team throws into the crowd. At $500 they get a logo on that shirt and shout-outs at games. At $1,000 they get larger logos, plus branded swag, foam fingers, backpacks, whatever the team is tossing out, all printed with the sponsor's brand. That swag goes into the hands of a lot of people, at the county fair parade, the Fourth of July parade, and every game. A business paying $1,000 is buying genuine, repeated exposure across the town for a year.
Morgan is candid about why the ROI framing matters more in a small place, and she speaks from both chairs. "It is hard in a small town because the businesses get hit up by all of the sports teams, and I've been a business owner, so I knew that. I want to know that it's giving me something back too, that it's not just a donation and it's just gone." So she leads with the exposure, not the appeal, and by her account the feedback from sponsors has been good.
When I asked Morgan what she'd tell a brand-new coach or a parent who just got handed the fundraising job, she didn't start with tactics. She started with arithmetic. Her first move every year is to build the budget: walk the season, estimate what each competition, prop fee, safety clinic, and uniform will cost, and total it up before doing anything else. If you don't know the numbers, call other coaches, because they've all been in your shoes and most are glad to help. That budget is what turns a vague, stressful "we need money" into a specific target you can actually plan against.
Then she does the part that stuck with me: she tells the parents the real number. At the start of the year every family gets an itemized estimate, competition fees are this much, props are this much, clinics and uniforms are this much, so they can see exactly what it costs to put their kid on the team. She pairs it with a parent meeting to read the room, because some parents would rather just pay out of pocket than fundraise, and if that's the majority you plan differently. The transparency does two things at once. It gives parents a reason to pitch in ("you're either paying this yourself or we do it together as a team"), and it protects the kids who can't pay, because Morgan's rule is that nobody gets turned away over money. "I don't want to have to pay $2,000 out of my pocket," she said, and neither do her families, which is exactly why the honesty lands.
This was the part of the conversation where Morgan spilled a dozen small, hard-won lessons in about two minutes. Her rule: a social media post is not an ask. At Duchesne the money comes in when the team talks to people directly, by text, by phone, or in person. She admits that it can be intimidating to make the ask, but you'll fall short if you're hoping more webpage visits, views, comments, or likes will do the trick - it won't. Morgan has had a cheerleader rack up the most views on the whole serve-a-thon by sharing constantly on Instagram and Facebook, and still she has to remind the team: the views are nice, but you have to actually ask. "No one likes to do it, but it's the only way you can get people to actually make money."
She had two more rules. First, keep the window short: two to three weeks is her magic length for a fundraiser, because much longer and everyone puts it off until the end anyway. Advertise hard the first couple of weeks, then get on the team about actually collecting. Second, make it a friendly competition. She runs a first, second, and third place for whoever raises the most, which turns a chore into a game the kids want to win.
Looking across the whole conversation, I count four things carrying this system at Duchesne. The first is that the ask matches the giver. The serve-a-thon collects from people who love a kid, the sponsorships collect from businesses that want exposure, and the clinics and concessions collect from fans having fun. Nobody is asked twice for the same reason, which matters in a town where every business hears from every team.
The second is that every dollar returns something. Families watch the team clean the bleachers and Main Street. A $1,000 sponsor sees its logo on shirts and swag at every game and two parades. Giving to Duchesne cheer isn't a donation that's "just gone," and that phrase is Morgan's own test, learned from her years as a business owner. The third is that the number is honest and shared: the itemized estimate turns "we need money" into a target every family understands, and each cheerleader carries a required share, hit it fundraising or pay it out of pocket. So far, she says, everyone has hit it. And the fourth is execution: a short window, direct asks, and the first-second-third competition keep each drive from stalling.
If it were me, I'd copy the structure exactly: the budget-first arithmetic, the itemized estimate to parents, the tiered ad ladder with the swag cost built into the $1,000 tier so the exposure pays for itself, and the service ratio itself. One hour per $250 is Morgan's number; any team can set the ratio its size supports.
What's local to Duchesne is the specific service: Main Street windows, bleacher cleanup, elves at the town Christmas celebration, swag flying at the county fair and Fourth of July parades. Your town has its own version. The transferable idea, I think, is to pick service your community actually sees. The visibility is doing real work here: the town watches what it paid for, and that's what makes it want to pay again.
She named the costs herself. The backend lands on one person: she designs every sponsor logo, uploads the artwork, finds and prices the swag, and keeps all the records. "It takes a lot of backend time on my part," she said, and while parents land the sponsors and the kids do the asking, the administration is all hers. A program copying this should decide up front who carries that. The swag itself eats margin too, about $150 of every $1,000 sponsorship goes back out the door as branded gear. She thinks the renewals justify it; the tier pricing should account for it either way.
Two more, briefly. Small towns can be over-asked, and Morgan treats that as a design constraint rather than a complaint; the ROI framing is what keeps the answer yes. And clarity is a gate: her flyer rule is that if someone is confused, they're not going to do it, so everything is priced and pitched to be understood at a glance.
The numbers, as Morgan gave them: the serve-a-thon raised over $5,000 this year and passed its goal, with 16 cheerleaders on the squad. The sponsorship program brought in about $20,000, closer to $25,000 or $26,000 in years with more kids. The junior clinics and junior-high concessions add a couple thousand dollars for the incidentals, and a per-family self-pay covers the bulk of the season.
The effort behind it: parents land the sponsors, the cheerleaders do the asking and the service hours (usually more hours than the math requires), and Morgan runs the back end, records, swag design and ordering, budgets, and the itemized estimates. Each drive runs two to three weeks. It's a real workload for a two-coach program that funds itself the way most extracurriculars do, and she finds it worth it.
Duchesne High cheer, at a glance: a small-town Utah program, 16 cheerleaders this year (as many as 30 in bigger years), funded entirely by the team, the way most high school extracurriculars are. The funding portfolio: a serve-a-thon (one hour of community service per $250 raised, over $5,000 this year), tiered business-sponsorship packages ($100 to $1,000, about $20,000 a year and the biggest earner), a junior cheerleader clinic run twice a year, junior-high concessions, and a per-family self-pay amount. Every family gets an itemized cost estimate up front. Fundraising windows run two to three weeks. The rule: no kid is turned away over money.
A lot of coaches treat fundraising as a necessary evil. Morgan doesn't. She sees it as part of what the program teaches. "It's preparing them for the world. We have to work for everything we want in life, and that's never going to go away." Her cheerleaders learn that nothing comes for free, that you show up on time and do the work and give back, and the town supports them because it can see all of that happening. What makes Duchesne's funding durable is what the fundraising itself gives back: the town gives because it can see the service, and the kids grow from earning it. Build the budget first. Spread the ask across a portfolio. Sell businesses real exposure. And remember Morgan's rule: the money comes from asking people directly, not from posting and hoping.
The serve-a-thon is a pledge-style drive at heart; there's more on that whole family of fundraisers in our pledge fundraiser guide. The sponsorship half runs on the same sell-advertising-not-sympathy logic as school sponsorship fundraisers, and our playbook on the sponsors-first golf tournament shows a bigger program running the same ad-ladder idea.
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