Traditional school fundraising is losing steam

The old fundraisers just don't pull in what they used to. Chocolate boxes come home half sold. Raffle books sit untouched for weeks. Volunteer numbers keep shrinking every year. It's not that people care less about supporting their school or club, it's that the traditional model has started working against itself.

Here's what's actually driving the decline, and what's starting to take its place.

Supporter fatigue is real

The average parent or club supporter is being asked to buy something almost constantly, whether it's for their own kid's school, a mate's kid's school or three different clubs across the year. When every fundraiser looks the same (another box of chocolates, another book of raffle tickets), people start saying no simply out of fatigue, not because they don't want to help.

Cost of living has changed what people are willing to buy

Overpriced, low value items are a much harder sell than they used to be. Paying above retail for a box of chocolates nobody particularly wanted was tolerated as just what you do for years, but with household budgets tighter than they've been in a long time, supporters are far more likely to skip a purchase that doesn't feel like it's worth the price, no matter how good the cause is.

Volunteers are burning out

Traditional fundraisers lean heavily on unpaid volunteer time. Someone has to source stock or prizes, manage cash and order forms, chase up money and handle distribution, often on top of a full time job and their own family. As fewer people put their hand up to help each year, the fundraisers that need the most manual effort are the first ones to quietly stop happening.

Margins were never that good to begin with

A lot of traditional fundraising products go through several layers of markup before they reach the school or club, which means a smaller share actually goes toward the cause than most supporters would assume. When a fundraiser demands a lot of effort for a modest return, it becomes hard to justify running it year after year, especially once a committee sits down and actually does the maths.

What's replacing it

The fundraisers gaining ground share a few things in common: they're low effort for organisers, they don't rely on chasing donations or handling cash and they offer supporters something they'd genuinely want at a fair price rather than an inflated one.

Online, order-direct campaigns. Instead of paper order forms and cash envelopes, supporters order and pay online through a dedicated campaign page, shared via email or social media. No forms to chase, no cash to reconcile and no stock sitting around.

Products people already buy. Rather than asking supporters to purchase something purely out of obligation, newer fundraising models tap into everyday purchases, like wine, that people were going to buy anyway. It removes the pity purchase feeling entirely and replaces it with something closer to redirecting a purchase they'd already planned to make.

Zero upfront cost and no unsold stock risk. Traditional fundraisers often require paying for stock upfront and hoping it sells. Newer models flip that around, supplying products only against confirmed orders, so there's no leftover stock, no wasted spend and no risk sitting with the school or club.

Higher margins with less admin. Because these models cut out several of the traditional markup layers and remove most of the manual admin work, a bigger share of each sale goes back to the cause, without requiring a bigger volunteer team to manage it.

Wine drives run through a merchant like Vinate are a good example of where this shift is heading. They ask nothing extra of supporters beyond redirecting a purchase they were likely to make anyway, they don't need volunteers chasing donations or managing stock and the margin per sale tends to be considerably better than a chocolate box or raffle ticket ever offered.

Traditional fundraising isn't disappearing overnight, plenty of schools and clubs will keep running a sausage sizzle or a raffle table for the social side of it. But when it comes to actually hitting a fundraising target, the shift toward simpler, higher margin, lower effort models is well underway and it's easy to see why.