How to Fundraise at a Basketball Tournament
Your basketball organization is hosting a tournament. The purpose of the tournament is to raise funds for your basketball teams. Although you will be receiving entry fees from the participating teams, most of that money will go towards paying officials. How can you raise money? This article will suggest some fundraising opportunities you can use when hosting a tournament.
Things You'll Need
- Volunteers
Instructions
Contact local businesses that would have an interest in supporting your program and promoting their business or organization. You can develop different levels of sponsorship to maximize revenue while matching the sponsor with a strong promotional opportunity. Some areas of sponsorship include: Charge admission for spectators--$3 for adults and $1 for students is a typical admission fee. From a multigrade tournament with 24 teams, for instance, you can generate over $1,000 in admissions alone. Sell food and beverages; it's typically the greatest fundraising opportunity. The typical concession stand will sell coffee and donuts in the morning and hot dogs, subs, candy and soda throughout the day. Be creative by providing some unique delicacies such as stuffed baked potatoes and smoothies to generate some significant revenue. Remember, you have a captive audience with a lot of down time--offer some good choices and you will provide a good service for your guests and make great money for your program. Work with a local T-shirt printer to design tournament T-shirts to sell. Players love to get T-shirts from all of the tournaments they play in. As a nice added touch, the T-shirt printer can provide on-site customization by putting the player's name and number on the back of the shirt. Make it a cool shirt and they will sell like hot cakes. Sell 50/50 raffle tickets to the tournament guests. You can sell each ticket for $1, 6 tickets for $5 and 12 tickets for $10. Inform the buyers that 50 percent of the raffle ticket revenue will go to the winning ticket and the other 50 percent goes to your program. As an added bonus, tell the partipants to hold onto their tickets after the winner is announced and then call out some more ticket numbers for free items from the concession stand.
• Advertising in the tournament program/roster sheet
• Sponsorship of each court (e.g. the Tony's Pizza court)
• Advertise on the photo backdrop--have a team photo area that has advertisers' logos. These photos will appear in newspapers and in homes--and get a lot of exposure.