Walk-a-Thon Chair Adrienne Virgilio knew that St. Francis de Sales School in Lake Zurick, Illinois, was in desperate need of an outstanding fundraiser. She never imagined that partnering with PledgeStar would see a profit of more than 10 times her original goal.

“One of our board members lived in Oregon for many years and had used PledgeStar for her children’s swim team,” says Ms. Virgilio, fundraising chair for the pre-K-8th-grade school her grandchildren attend. “I didn’t want to waste time researching other online fundraising companies, so I went with PledgeStar and didn’t regret it. The reporting package and website graphics are phenomenal.”

Once St. Francis committed to using PledgeStar, Ms. Virgilio chose a modest $5,000 goal for the Walk-a-Thon. Knowing how successful the school could be, PledgeStar staff gently nudged her to raise that figure to $30,000. “At the time, I thought that was crazy!” says Ms. Virgilio. “I was worried about fundraising fatigue during our event’s 3-week window, but I’m glad I listened because we ended up raising $51,000.”

Ms. Virgilio says that the support and availability of PledgeStar staff made the process seamless and stress-free and was key to her event’s overall success. “PledgeStar gave me the confidence that this was really going to work,” she explains. “They didn’t turn down a single one of our requests. When you’re worried about using a new company and someone returns your call in 5 minutes, that tells you the quality you’re dealing with–even with us being in another time zone!”

Another concern at St. Francis prior to partnering with PledgeStar was the school’s socioeconomic diversity and how raising a significant amount of money would be challenging. “We have a huge range of economic means at our school, but our average donation was $92,” Ms. Virgilio says, emphasizing it wasn’t just a few families donating large sums. “PledgeStar made our Walk-a-Thon accessible to every St. Francis family. When everyone does a little, no one has to do a lot,” she adds. “We didn’t get to $51,000 because a couple families made large donations. We got there from many small-dollar donations.”

In addition to promoting the ability to have donors cover credit card fees as well as the corporate matching option, the team at St. Francis strategically chose prizes of little to no cost in order to send as much money as possible back to the school. “Our most popular prizes were the ones that didn’t cost anything, like principal for the day, movies at school, out of uniform passes, and pie-ing the principal,” says Ms. Virgilio.

The overwhelming success of using PledgeStar for the school’s fundraiser made it possible for St. Francis to fulfill every request on their teachers’ classroom wish lists. “Since we surpassed our goal considerably, we had money leftover for budget items whose financing was in doubt,” says Ms. Virgilio. “The parents will also be thrilled to learn that some of the funds are going toward improved—and vital—campus security.”