Run It Well

Prizes That Make Students Actually Compete

A fundraiser with no prizes gets participation from the students who were going to help anyway. A fundraiser with the wrong prizes gets a two-person race and forty spectators. The difference is mostly in how the tiers are drawn.

Misty Gaunt Fundraising partner, GoodFundraising.org 615-414-3837

The four tiers, and what they ask for

The prize structure here rewards customers signed up, not dollars sold. That distinction matters more than it sounds, and the rest of this article is largely about why.

Prize	What it is	What it takes
	$25 gift card	10 customers
	Wireless earbuds	50 customers
	Nintendo Switch 2	100 customers
	$1,000 grand prize	Top seller, 100 customers minimum

Confirm the current tiers before you promise anything to a student. Prize promotions can change, and the fastest way to lose a roster's trust is to announce a console in September that has been replaced by something else in November. Check what is live, put the date on your flyer, and say out loud that prizes are set by LiveGood and can change.

Why threshold prizes beat percentage prizes

Plenty of fundraisers offer a cut: sell more, keep a slice. It sounds fair and it motivates almost nobody, for a reason that is easy to see once you have watched it.

A percentage has no finish line. A student who signs up two customers gets a small reward, feels the reward was small, and concludes the whole thing is not worth the awkwardness. Nothing in the structure tells them what "doing well" looks like.

A threshold does. Ten customers is a specific, countable, reachable thing. Students who are at seven know they are at seven, and three more is a concrete afternoon of asking rather than an open-ended commitment to sell. Thresholds also let a student decide to stop, which sounds like a weakness and is actually why they get started.

A leaderboard changes behavior more than the prize does

Post the standings where the group sees them. On the band room wall, in the team group chat, at the top of the weekly email. Update it on a fixed day so people look for it.

What a visible leaderboard actually does is convert a private task into a public one. A student who has not started can see that six of their friends have. A student on eight customers can see they are two off the first tier. That information is doing most of the motivational work, and it costs nothing.

Two rules make it usable. Update it on schedule, because a stale leaderboard is worse than none. And show the customer count, not dollars, so nobody is ranked by how wealthy their relatives are.

Keeping it from becoming a contest two kids can win

By week two, most fundraisers have separated into three or four students way out front and everyone else quietly opting out. The grand prize is now decided, and the rest of the roster knows it.

The fix is not to remove the top prize. It is to make sure it was never the only thing worth chasing.

Lead with the first tier

In every announcement, the headline number should be the one almost anyone can hit, not the grand prize. The Switch and the $1,000 belong in the small print of the flyer, as proof the ceiling is high. Ten customers belongs in the headline, in bold, because that is the tier that decides whether the middle of your roster plays at all.

Add group goals the club controls

The prize tiers come from LiveGood and cannot be altered. What your group can add is its own layer, and the good ones are usually collective: when the whole group passes a customer count you set, the coach takes a pie to the face, the sponsor wears the rival team's colors for a day, practice starts thirty minutes late. Group goals pull in the students who will never top a leaderboard but will happily contribute to a total.

Recognize categories other than first place

Most improved from the previous week. First to reach ten. Most customers who came from outside the family. Any of these creates a second and third race, which is the whole point.

Recognition that costs nothing

The cheapest incentives are usually the ones students remember, because they are public and they come from an adult whose opinion matters to them.

• Their name read out at the start of practice or rehearsal.
• A shout-out on the program's social account, with a photo, if your school's media policy allows it.
• Being the one who announces the group total at the next event.
• A handwritten note to a parent about their kid, which is remembered far longer than a gift card.
• First pick of seats on the bus, or first in line for warm-ups. Small privileges, easy to give.

None of this replaces the real tiers. It fills the stretch between announcements when nothing structural is happening and attention drifts.

How the customer count makes this workable

The reason a customer-based prize ladder is fair here is the product. Buyers are getting supplements at member prices a few dollars above cost, so signing someone up is closer to a recommendation than a sale. Organic D3-K2 2000 is $19.95 retail and $9.50 at member price. Ultra Magnesium Complex is $19.95 and $9.95. Super Greens is $34.95 and $19.95.

That is why ten customers is a realistic target for a student who is not a natural salesperson: it is ten people who were going to buy vitamins anyway. Meanwhile the group earns 20% of every first order and 10% of every reorder those customers place afterwards, which is why the organization's interest and the student's prize target point in the same direction.

Set the prize expectations honestly, though. Prizes depend on customers signed up, and no student should be told what they will win before they have done it. If you want to compare what an incentive-driven campaign returns against the traditional options, that is in candy bars, car washes and recurring income, and you can model your own roster in the fundraising calculator.

Misty Gaunt

Misty helps schools, teams, churches and nonprofits set up recurring fundraisers through LiveGood. She will look at your roster and tell you whether the model fits before you commit to anything. Call or text 615-414-3837.