Two years ago, the PTA at Rogers Middle School in Long Beach, California hired an outside fundraising company to run their annual pledge drive. After the company took 50% of the school’s fundraising earnings, PTA member Leslie Anderson decided to run the event herself.

Anderson learned about the PledgeStar fundraising system from a friend, and immediately knew the service was right for Rogers. To get the student participants excited, Anderson and the other parents threw a kick-off assembly. Parents and faculty hyped up the student crowd by dancing to old hip hop songs before a video was shown informing the students of how the pledge drive would work. “We made a video and PowerPoint presentation to teach the students about PledgeStar, and showed them all the cool prizes they could earn!”

Along with PledgeStar’s automated pledge reminders, Anderson and the PTA sent out weekly email reminders to participants’ families, posted daily Facebook updates on the fundraiser’s progress, and shouted out students for reaching certain prize goal levels.

By keeping the student body engaged, Rogers raised over $44,000, money they put towards the purchasing of Chromebook laptops and water bottle filling stations for the school.

Anderson praised PledgeStar’s ease of use and affordability during the fundraiser. “Because we put the event on ourselves, we really needed a service that was easy to use and allowed us to keep the majority of our donations. After handing a big name fundraising company a check for 50% of our donations earned, we were pleasantly surprised to pay PledgeStar only $1,195.”

Additionally, the included offline pledge donation tracker and real time prize reporting tools meant less work for Anderson and the PTA at Rogers. With PledgeStar, they worked less, and raised more.