Spring Fundraising Cards are very popular this year. Our Little League Baseball and Football Leagues and teams all over the country realize that fundraising has become the new normal….and fundraising cards are what people want to buy. Althogh we specialize in large groups sales, we also enjoy helping smaller teams and high school organizations such as Band, Music Choir, Cheerleading, Spanish Clubs and prom committees all over the US. This is the busiest year we have ever seen in our 18 year history and we can attribute that to the undeniable desire to save money at places you already shop. People love our fundraising discount cards and we understand how important your fundraising efforts are to your group. In our 18 years, groups have made well over $10,000,000.00 with our program and now have some individual groups approaching profits of $75,000 per year on these promotions. In previous blogs, I have written about how customers no longer care as much about supporting your groups as they care about supporting themselves…that is a very true statement! Just don’t forget to the give them what they want….A very good discount card with great discounts from great merchants. Our full serice fundraising discount cards set up apart from all the rest! Again, it doesnt matter what you pay for cards if you cant sell them…………….so make sure you buy the best fundraising discount cards available. Have a great Spring!
Fundraising Cards have Never Been More Popular
Fundraising Cards have never been more popular than today. We have been generating these discount cards for 18 years and have never seen the interest level rise to the point we are at today. People love saving money at places they were already going to shop anyway and we believe this the main reason for the popularity rise. School discount cards have been around for about 25 years and are probably the number one fundraiser in America. Little league discount card sales, school discount cards, football discount cards and Athletic Department fundraising cards account for almost 30% of all the group fundraising we track and yet still seems to be on the rise.
The only way you can go wrong with this idea or product is choosing the wrong discount card company. I will be the first to say that there are several reputable companies out there that do a great job generating cards; by the same token, there are a few things that you need to be aware of to avoid choosing the wrong company. The first idea to think about is the following. We hear this all the time: “I have seen other internet companies that charge less for the same thing”. I have never seen this to be the case. Upon further examination, the customer normally realizes that the cheap card company has some sort of clause that explains how they only have to secure 12 merchants for your card and you may have no choice over what they secure; maybe the have hidden charges or crazy set-up fees or they may charge for shipping. Above all else remember this: it doesn’t matter how much a company charges for their cards if you can’t sell them. We should trademark this quote because it’s what people understand and is the easiest way to explain the important details of the sale. Securing great discounts from great merchants is the secret recipe when it comes to fundraising discount cards. Call EMI today to see how you can improve your fundraising efforts. 800-711-3200
Fundraising is BACK!
Ok, the world isn’t going to implode after all! It’s been a tough road for most of us the last four years but we are slowly beginning to see the light and realize that life goes on, as do your group’s expenses. A lot of things have changed in the fundraising landscape the last couple of years and most of these changes were precipitated by economic issues. The most recognizable change has been in the customers and their demand for quality and value.
People used to support groups, teams and schools simply because it was a worthwhile cause… not anymore. Supporting your group has become a by-product of these people supporting themselves by saving money utilizing the Fundraising Discount card your group just sold them. I can remember when people sold frozen pizzas, cookie dough and wrapping paper annually. People usually bought enough to keep their group funded the entire year. The market for perishable food products and specialty products have subsided the last four years and our Fundraising Cards have filled a lot of those gaps.
People want to save money at places they already shop and supporting your group is unfortunately a by-product. Many people no longer support groups; they only support themselves and it’s our job to give you the correct marketing tool to allow people to still do both. Given the chance, they will support your group annually if you are able to support their savings. We have been generating the best selling, most profitable group discount cards for 17 years. We realized early on that quality discounts along with great customer service is the perfect recipe for a long career in helping our groups stay well funded.
Whatever product you decide to use, we are always available to consult with your group and help answer any fundraising questions you may have so please give us a call anytime. Have a great holiday season and good luck in 2013! 800-711-3200
$60,000 with EMI Discount Cards
Recently, EMI helped 3 high schools surpass the $60,000 fundraising mark with our discount cards, and we plan on doing the same thing again next year.
Can you imagine raising $60,000 for your group? What things could your group do this year with an extra 60 grand… and the ability to replicate the fundraiser year after year?
Here at EMI, we help groups of all sizes raise money, though we specialize in large group soccer, football and little league fundraising.
A 60 thousand dollar fundraiser may seem unattainable, but it’s really not. In the past, groups have focused on the Pro Series discount card that they sell for $10 a piece. Recently, though, even in an unfavorable economy, more and more groups have been able to push the single and triple tag discount cards that sell for $20 each.
Your customers – the people in your community – are happy to invest $20 in a group fundraising card that in turn gives them the ability to save thousands of dollars throughout the year at places they already shop. Here at EMI, we spend extra time developing relationships with your local merchants. When we call, they are eager to speak with us because of the benefit they receive from advertising on the card as well.
Because of these relationships and our marketing team’s ability to work out great discount offers, we are able to build superior cards with amazing graphics and local discount deals that can’t be found anywhere else.
over the past 17 years, EMI has continued to grow and adapt our fundraising as necessary. This year, we added online access to the discount cards, a place for you to sell your cards online and thousands of new local and national online discounts. Consumers are more than happy to help your fundraiser while buying a great product at the same time.
Large groups who utilize our sales envelopes, excellent discount offers and online access can easily master fundraisers in the tens of thousands of dollars year after year. If you are ready to get serious about fundraising, call us today and we’ll send you some free samples.
The Year of the Billion Dollar Campaigns
In a previous blog post, we talked about how President Obama utilized social media to create one of the most successful fundraising campaigns of all time. That fundraiser raised close to $750M.
Social media continues to grow in usage year after year. So it’s no surprise that experts predict that his reelection campaign will top $1 Billion. But more surprising, Mitt Romney’s campaign may possibly hit the same mark.
That’s brand new territory for presidential candidates. In 2008, Obama raised nearly $746 million. That was double what George W. Bush raised just four years earlier — which itself was double what Bush raised four years before that. This is the first time ever that presidential fundraising shot up that fast.
But it all makes perfect sense.
About 2/3 of Obama’s record-setting fundraising was earned from online donations in 2008 (over $500M). We all know that each year, the internet becomes more popular, new social media sites pop up, and new trends come about. Luckily for Obama and any group who wants to create a fundraising campaign, the 2012 online trend is raising money.
Take sites like indiegogo where complete strangers managed to raise over $700,000 for a bus monitor all online in a couple of weeks. Then, we turned around and raised over $7,000 all online for the guy who started the fundraiser for the bus monitor.
Then, there’s Facebook’s Causes and JustGive and SocialVibe and literally hundreds of thousands of other sites designed specifically for online fundraising.
What sets EMI apart from other fundraising card companies is that we provide a fundraising product that has raise money for groups just like yours year-after-year for over 17 years. With that said, we also adapt to advancements in technology and online social interaction. EMI gives you the ability to not just offer your discount card customers a great card with 20 or more awesome local discounts; we also give you the ability to offer them access to over 100,000 online deals. These deals can often be printed out and taken into a store or used as a coupon code for online shopping.
We provide an option online outlet to sell your cards as well. Networking within your community and word-of-mouth will no doubt help you sell these cards. But why not take it to the next level like our President and utilize online sales and social media to increase the volume of cards that you can sell and make this next fundraiser the most successful one ever for your group.
Fundraising Like Obama
In early 2007, Barack Obama was a little-known senator running for democratic presidential nominee against Hilary Clinton. A few month’s later, he was sworn into office as the 44th president of the United States.
Running a presidential campaign is very similar to running a business. You need money. To get money, you need marketing. You may have the best ideas to save the world, but if you can’t convey that message to the mass audience via advertising, you’ll never win a presidential race. President Obama is usually known as the first Africa-American president. But he’s also the first to run an extremely aggressive social media fundraising and marketing campaign, which would ultimately play a huge factor in his success.
In this article, we’ll use a presidential race as an example to relate the same importance of marketing to your fundraising cards.
Social Media and Fundraising
President Obama effectively used social media technology, such as Facebook, to raise money for his campaign and to develop a huge following of hyped-up volunteers who felt they could truly make a difference.
Obama won by changing regular people into engaged volunteers, donors and advocates through social networks, viral e-mail chains, text messaging and online video. The campaign’s social media awareness, marketing and fundraising is a major reason for his victory.
Without Fundraising, There is No Victory
Obama’s campaign garnered 5 million supporters on social networks. By November 2008, Obama had approximately 3 million Facebook supporters, nearly 4 times what McCain had. Obama had over 115,000 followers on Twitter, more than 23 times that of McCain. Fifty million viewers spent 14 million hours watching campaign-related videos on YouTube, four times more than McCain’s viewers. The campaign sent out 1 billion e-mails, including 10,000 unique messages targeted at specific segments of their 13-million member list. The campaign had signed up 3 million mobile and SMS subscribers. On election day alone, supporters received three texts. Obama won by nearly 200 electoral and 8.5 million popular votes.
The Significance of Online Fundraising
The campaign’s social network, www.my.barackobama.com (MyBO), allowed individuals to connect to one another and activate themselves on behalf of the campaign. Two million profiles were created. Registered users and volunteers planned over 200,000 offline events, wrote 400,000 blog posts, and created 35,000 volunteer groups. Obama raised $639 million from 3 million donors, mostly through the Internet.
Volunteers on MyBO generated $30 million on 70,000 personal fundraising pages. Donors made 6.5 million donations online, totaling more than $500 million. Of those donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less, the average being $80. The average donor gave more than once. The campaign not only used these tools more effectively than other candidates to organize, communicate, and fundraise, but also leveraged them to support its strategy that tapped into the hearts of the voters.
What resulted was both a victory for Barack Obama, and the legacy of one of the most effective internet marketing plans in history.
What Does This Have to Do With Fundraising Cards?
By no means are we suggesting that your group can raise millions of dollars using our fundraising products. What we are suggesting is that if you use our fundraising cards, you will be the next president (kidding). We’re obviously working on a much smaller level, but that doesn’t mean that the same principles don’t apply. Almost everyone that you know, and don’t know, has a Facebook account. Many of them have Twitter accounts too. A lot of them are on Google+
There’s no easier way to reach out to your potential customers and financial supporters for your group than leveraging social media. Definitely don’t neglect school functions, newsletters, word of mouth, and other traditional marketing methods, but make sure to take advantage of online networking outlets as well. EMI allows you to take advantage of social media marketing, online discount card sales and additional online-exclusive offers to give to your customers. We’ll show you how to add social media, websites and much more to create viral marketing campaigns fit for a president.
Karen the Bus Monitor
By now, you may have heard about Karen Klein, the 63-year-old bus monitor who was bullied by a bunch of kids. The YouTube video that went viral has turned into one of the most fascinating fundraisers that we have seen in a long time.
If you are unfamiliar with Karen the bus monitor, here is a run-down of the story. A 10-minute video was posted to YouTube on June 19, 2012 (3 days prior to this post). The video was taken by a student on a bus of other students bullying the bus monitor, Karen. At this moment, the video has 3,719,678 views and climbing every second.
I personally only watched the first couple of minutes of the video because much of it was too difficult to watch. The students from Greece Central School District (New York), harassed their bus monitor by calling her ugly, fat, disgusting and worse. They insulted her non-stop while she say there and cried. She told the students that if they had nothing nice to say, to not say anything at all. That comment was responded by the young children with more insults and expletives. The bus monitor is reported to earn about $15,506 annually at her job; not nearly enough to put up with this kind of bullying.
I originally found out about this incident, and subsequent fundraiser, on the day that it occurred from a web site called Reddit. Reddit is a site where millions of users contribute links to cool stuff and other Redditors can vote to increase or decrease the popularity of that link/story/picture, thus getting the most popular user-content to the top of the page. I saw this story and also found that a fellow Redditor had created a fundraiser for Karen on a site called indiegogo.
The goal of the fundraiser was to raise $5,000 to send Karen on a much needed dream vacation. Any additional funds would then go to her if the goal was met. On June 19, the fundraiser was set for 30 days with the 5k goal. On the evening of the 19th, I checked the fundraising page and could not believe that over $43,000 had already been raised for Karen. Within less than 24 hours, the goal had been met and surpassed 9 times over. It was great to see people pitching in money to send this nice lady on a vacation.
What’s even more amazing is that the donations haven’t stopped. Once Yahoo, CNN and others picked up on the story, it really took off. People were astonished by the hate spewed out of these kids mouths towards this elderly woman who seems to be nothing but gentle and wouldn’t hurt a fly. When I started writing this blog, the fundraiser had raised $462,000 already. I just now hit refresh after writing these few paragraphs and during that time and additional $3,000 has been donated.
At this second (it will probably be even higher by the time you check it out), 21,738 people have donated a total of $465,826 to Karen which is an average donation of $21.43 per donation. There’s even a petition now to Obama to give Karen this money tax-free so that she can go on her vacation and retire. By the way, this amount is about 30 years of her salary.
We just hit refresh again and it went up another $1,500. A pretty cool fundraiser to watch… See what it’s up to now.
School Fundraisers Busy During the Summer
We are one day in to Summer which is a very busy time for us here at EMI. Though schools are out for the summer, now is the time where groups are preparing for their Fall fundraising promotions.
Right now, our most popular fundraising products are our football fundraising cards. Even though school has just let out for the summer, football teams will soon be back at practice in the blazing heat preparing for their coming football seasons. Taking reps out on the field and getting into game shape are definitely key points in preparing for the season.
But, behind the scenes, groups are working hard to raise the money needed to support their football and other athletic teams. The EMI design team is working closely with our football groups to come up with original, fresh designs. Our marketing team is also working hard to secure the best possible deals for our groups.
Our triple tag card has really seen a surge in popularity among groups this year. Our football groups generally choose to include their season’s schedule on the front of the card which adds even more value to the card. Speaking of value, the triple tag’s popularity is probably based around the 3 additional key tags that come with the card, which often include exception values. You can just hang these key tags on your keychain and use it day after day at your favorite shops and restaurants!
Additionally, this is one of our products that also gives your group and your customers access to over 100,000 additional national and online offers and coupons.
EMI will be staying cool all Summer long helping awesome groups just like yours prepare for next school year’s fundraising activities.
EMI: Adds Thousands of New Coupon Deals to Discount Cards
Here at Educational Marketing, Inc., we like to think that we offer the most profitable fundraising cards that you can find. But the question is – how do we make our discount cards so profitable?
We start with the cards themselves. We make full-color professional designs by using talented, experienced graphic artists. We also secure 20 (or more) great local discounts on every card that we design; and we secure those discounts for you.
But in addition to the card itself, EMI also offers all of our customers access to hundreds of thousands of additional online discounts, daily deals, and printable coupons. Compare these features to other fundraising companies who have poor designs, 14-16 mediocre offers and charge you extra for online deals. At EMI, we include these deals for free. Go ahead, check it out for yourself.
We have amazing deals from places all over the web – Kohls, Walgreens, Sears, Amazon, Macy’s, Dell… and the list goes on. We add new deals and coupons every single day. You can even help us by contributing your own coupons, or sign up on the website to receive coupon alerts for the categories or places that you love to shop.
For our groups, this feature is an incredible selling tool. When you sell your discount cards to the consumers in your area, it’s a very small investment for them to pay in order to support your group, receive an amazing full-color discount card with great savings all over town and access to countless more online deals and printable coupons via the free website that you get when you sign up with EMI! We’d love to tell you more about what sets us apart and give you real-life examples of the profitable fundraisers we have been responsible for over the past 17 years. 800.711.3200
By Phil Dattilo
The Carmel Football Card
Carmel High School in Indiana has a lot of pride for their Greyhound football. Year after year, the Carmel football team finishes the season with a winning record. In fact, Carmel was the 2011 5A State Champions. But the best part of all is that the Greyhounds are winners off the field as well.
For several years, Carmel football has trusted their fundraising campaigns to EMI. And every year, we are able to secure some of the best discounts around town for the discount card. Last year’s fundraising was so successful that Carmel was eager to renew their discount card for 2012-2013.
The new card is valid from July 1, 2012 through July 1, 2013. Each of the 23 discounts on the card can be used daily for an entire year. Just as they did last year, Greyhound Football has chosen the Triple Tag Discount Card. The 20 discounts included on the back of the card include great savings at McDonalds, Max & Erma’s, Detour, Baskin Robbins, Yogurtz, Zacky’s Hot Dogs, Sports Clips, Which Which, iSushi, Burger King, Panda Express, Arby’s, Papa Johns, Friday’s, Cafe St. Tropez, Dunkin Donuts, Main Street Barber Shop, Tuchman Cleaners, Stacked Pickle, and Jiffy Lube.
Aside from these 20 great reusable deals, this card also features 3 keytags with exceptional offers that you can carry on your keychain. Those three offers include Dick’s Sport Goods, Brookshire Golf Club, and Moe’s Southwest Grill. The card itself is equivalent to the size of a credit card and will easily fit into your pocket or wallet.
The Football team suggested many of these businesses and we did our best to negotiate with these businesses to get the best deals. The football team doesn’t have to do anything except sell the card, which we help with too. We took care of securing all of the deals, designing the card, printing the card and delivering the cards. The team can now raise all kinds of money by selling these cards to people in the Carmel area and you can even buy one online.
The card is easy to sell because of the great discounts and you are offering a reusable discount card to consumers to save a lot of money at places they are already spending money.
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