A plant fundraiser can be somewhat challenging or intimidating if you have not done one before. Here are 3 tips for a successful plant fundraiser.
1. Set a sales goal for your fundraiser – you don’t want to get stuck with plants leftover that you can’t sell or need more plants than have because your sellers sold more than you ordered. The best way to determine how many plants (mums or poinsettias) you can sell is to get together with your seller and decide on a reasonable number that each seller can sell then multiply that number by the total number of seller you have.
For example, you set individual sell’s goal of 10 pots and you have 30 sellers so your default sales goal would be 300 pots (10 x 30 = 300).
This total number then becomes your group sales goal.
2. Pre-book and pre-sell your fundraiser – pre-book your plant order based on your groups sales goals to ensure that you have enough plants to fill the orders that you take. Next pre-sell based on individual seller goals. This way you know what you have on order, your selling group knows how many it has to sell and each seller knows how much they need to contribute in sales orders to reach that goal.
3. Communication – your sellers need to be in continuous communication with your fundraising coordinator. They should be letting the coordinator know on a weekly or daily basis how much of their individual sales goal they have met. The coordinator also needs to be communicating to each seller how many total pot of plants are left to sell especially if some of your sellers have sold more than their set sales goal which lowers the individual seller sales goals as you continue to pre-sell.
Also the coordinator needs to be communicating with their supplier about how well their pre-selling is going and making any adjustments to their pre-booked order especially if they oversell and need more product. There may not always be any extra product available to pull from if a fundraiser does sell more than they originally planned.
Those are our 3 tips to a successful plant fundraiser. There is a little more to it than that but if you remember these tips you are well on your way to a successful fundraiser.
Bonus tip – calculate the break even point in your fundraiser based on your group sales goals. This number will tell you how many pots you have to sell to pay for your order. The break even point can be figured by total dollar amount divided by your selling cost per unit. For example if you ordered $1500 dollar in poinsettias and you are selling them for $10 each, you will need to sell 150 pots to break even. Once you sell more than 150 pots in this example, each pot you sell is profit. Sometimes it is good to show this as a visualization so that your sellers can see where they are at regarding your break even number and your total sales goal.