Whether you’re working towards your FFA SAE or community service project, knowing how to strategically plan to meet your fundraising goals is important to success. Country Meats helps you get there in a few simple steps. We’ve got a delicious smoked pork meat snack stick that people love to buy, and we’ve been partners with FFA since 1985! Selling Country Meats is a fantastic fundraising idea.
How Do I Set Fundraising Goals?
First, make sure your fundraising goals are manageable and realistic. For example, let’s say you’re the head of your local FFA chapter, and you need to raise $1000 to cover registration, travel, and meals for your group to attend a day-long event out of town. With Country Meats, a traditional in-person fundraiser lets you keep 50% of each sale, meaning you earn $113 for every case sold. You can meet the $1000 goal by selling nine cases of our meat sticks.
Broken down in this way, if you have 10 members of your FFA chapter, you can get to the event with money left over if each member sells only one case of snack sticks. Now that’s a manageable and realistic goal! For a real-life example, check out this high school woodworking teacher’s plan to take his students to the state skills conference.
How Do I Meet My Goals?
Once you’ve set realistic and manageable goals, the next step is to prepare your team to meet them. Coach your team—whether they’re students or adults—with positivity, and identify your top sellers quickly so you can get them front and center of potential customers. Offering flexible payment options, including cards and digital payment apps, also boosts sales, especially for customers who don’t carry cash. Set daily or weekly benchmarks and celebrate sales to keep up momentum for your fundraiser. We’re happy to send along free posters and display boxes at your request if you want promotional materials for your display booth. We even offer downloadable marketing tools on our Facebook community group, including flyers, social media posts, tracking sheets, checklists, and more!
Meeting FFA Fundraising Goals With The SMART Formula
The SMART* formula for fundraising is often used to help set and meet goals. “SMART” is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. The SMART formula helps your group be “smart” about goal-setting, expectations, and results. The idea is to set specific and attainable goals that you can measure. It’s important for morale and success to have small goals that will add up to a huge win for your FFA chapter.
As for “relevant” and “timely,” the point is to make sure your customers know 1) why you’re raising money, 2) why it’s important, and 3) how long you have to raise the funds. Understanding the relevance of your fundraiser makes people want to support your cause, or, in this case, buy your meat sticks! If customers understand that your group only has a limited time to raise a certain amount of money, they understand that their window to buy is short. This urgency causes customers to buy right away instead of waiting until later. Many organizations choose to follow the SMART formula as a winning strategy for meeting fundraising goals because it works.
If you’re ready to start your FFA Country Meats fundraiser, order today. If you have more questions or need more information, we’re happy to help. Call us at 1 (800) 277-8989 or send an email to customerservice@countrymeats.com.
*The SMART formula was established by corporate planning expert George T. Doran in 1981 as a way to set and reach management goals. It has since been used as a successful fundraising strategy.