Our Fundraising Model

Fundraising deliberately promotes experiential-learning, environmental stewardship and civic engagement, empowering students by integrating appealing and meaningful activities into the fund-raising process. Our model is based on three simple ideas: doing, learning and sharing.

Doing

Students raise school funds by soliciting sponsorship in a school-wide environmental service project, such as planting a daffodil garden or cleaning up a park. While the school keeps 50 percent of funds raised, 35 percent goes to a philanthropy account at InspiringKids and 15 percent covers the direct cost of the fundraiser and follow-up services. The school keeps 100% of the amount raised above the cap of $5,000.

Sponsorship for Stewardship Blueprints: In the stewardship model, students get sponsors to complete a green activity, instead of selling a product to raise money. The InspiringKids blueprint includes accompanying tools and templates that guide a school through the steps for conducting service day activities. Each new blueprint added to our library has been piloted by students and educators and details the best practices resulting from the pilot.

Learning

Students research and invest in social and environmental causes at the local, national and global level to address some of our biggest national and global challenges: education, poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation.

Philanthropy: Regardless of the blueprint chosen, students direct some funds to support organizations that are improving their local, national and global communities. The guiding tool of our philanthropy is the Making a Difference Matrix --a framework for allocating philanthropy dollar and tracking the yearly and multi-year impact of school activities.

Sharing

Students use our website and online community to share their successes and spread their ideas for improving our world, promoting student philanthropy and leadership in an empowering, genuine and viral way.

Online Community: A significant contribution to the InspiringKids program is our online community and resource center. Our website serves as the hub of a school's program activities, cultivating community-sharing experiences and best practices. Two sets of password-protected school pages make it easy to manage and track activities, review impact and plan future projects.

Sample Community Page: For students, parents and educators to review school activities, connect with other school communities and track school-specific impact.
Sample Ambassador Page: For parents and educators to organize fundraisers, manage information year-after-year and check results.