Yard Work Fundraisers

Yard fundraisers are great school fundraisers to get the kids outside and helping to improve your community. Sell or raffle off yard duties as the prize.

A yard maintenance fundraiser is a good way to raise money for a special improvement project, to benefit a church, school team or youth organization. Depending on the season, your list of yard fundraising services can feature:

• Flower bedding—planting and weeding flower beds
• Raking leaves
• Shoveling snow
• Tree or branch removal
• Cutting lawns
• Watering lawns
• Clearing yard waste
• Putting up or painting fences

Regardless of what you decide to put on your list of services, you will have elderly and busy people in your community who will be glad to pay someone else to do their lawn work for them.

Here are some great ways to make money with a lawn maintenance fundraiser:

Take Pledges

Offer a list of lawn services in exchange for pledges. Taking pledges from the community can be done in a couple of different ways:

• Long-term lawn projects – If your customer is looking for a committed team of yard workers to build a fence or shed, or if they’d like to retain your services for the whole summer season, you can ask them to pledge a certain amount each month to your fundraising pot.
• Short-term lawn projects – Ask for one-time pledges based on the yard work effort or time from workers. Donors can pay a set amount for each square foot weeded, or for each hour worked.

Yard Raffle or Silent Auction

After you’ve cleaned up the grounds of a local church or business, ask them if you can host a raffle or auction on their property. This will garner great promotion for your lawn services and add to your fundraising dollars. Approach local businesses and ask for donations in exchange for advertising. The great thing is that your donations will be tax deductible, plus you will be able to raffle off the items for charity funds. Try to get an array of small items and one or two showcase items. You can sell individual raffle tickets, or you can invite interested buyers to write down their bids on a sheet of paper silent auction style. The highest bid gets the item, and the bid money goes in your fundraising pot.

Sell Garden Products

There are fundraising organizations that serve as distributors for lawn and garden products. They can complement and add to your list of yard care services. Think about how convenient it would be to sell the flowers that your client is paying you to plant? Flowering plants and bushes such as rose, lilac, cherry blossom, and fruit trees serve as great and earth-friendly fundraising items. Fundraising product distributors can be found online, and they provide you with catalogs that you can bring to interested customers for browsing. You simply take their orders and earn a percentage of the profits for your fundraiser.

Final tips for yard fundraising success:

• Advertise your yard fundraising services with a target audience—elderly and busy people in the community.
• Look to the media—contact local newspapers and radio stations or send them press releases with the details of your fundraising efforts, lawn services available and costs.
• If you’re fundraising for a church or school, ensure details go home in your church bulletin or school newsletter.
• Be clear that you’re marketing a fundraiser, and be clear as to where the money is going and what it’s being raised for.
• Be specific to sponsors and volunteers about how much money you want to raise and how much time you expect them to commit.

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