With baseball season now pretty much year-round, teams are often seeking creative baseball fundraising ideas to help support their budding all-stars. Baseball is an extremely popular sport in the United States, with millions of kids participating on youth teams at various levels from little league to middle school to high school all year long.
While fundraising for your baseball team is important to help provide them with exciting opportunities for their season, whether it’s for uniforms or game transportation costs, it’s also a way to help your young athletes build character, and gain a sense of ownership and responsibility, which are skills they’ll use well after the baseball season is over.
By participating in a baseball fundraising event, your athletes will have the opportunity to let their hard work pay off in a way that supports their team on and off the field.
The Home Run of Baseball Fundraising Ideas
You’ll certainly find no shortage of baseball fundraising ideas for your team, many of which you might have already tried. But if you’re looking for a youth sports fundraising idea that everyone will enjoy, a hit-a-thon fundraiser is a fantastic way to raise funds for your sports team that is pretty easy to plan and execute. A hit-a-thon fundraiser comes with a high profit vs investment in materials. Best of all, it showcases the awesome skills your youth baseball team members have been working on with their coaches.
If you’re not familiar with a hit-a-thon, the concept is pretty simple: it’s a sponsorship program where loyal donors and fans of your team sign up to donate a certain amount of money per hit and/or per home run hit. Easy, right? It’s such a great way to get your baseball team families and local community members involved in support your team.
Five Steps for A Successful Hit-A-Thon
Here are 5 simple steps you’ll need to follow in order to host a hit-a-thon fundraising event for your baseball team.
1. Determine when you’ll host your hit-a-thon. You can create a special scrimmage event just for your hit-a-thon, or you could designate a specific game (or games) that are already scheduled in your season as your “hit-a-thon.” Perhaps it’s a game with a known rival, or on an important holiday or special day for your team or community. Whatever you decide, you’ll want to pick a game (or schedule a special scrimmage) well in advance to give your team, their families, and other supporters enough time to secure sponsorships.
2. Decide how much each hit is worth. Because the donations are based on the number of hits and number of home runs for the donor’s sponsored player, you’ll need to decide how much each hit and home run is worth. This will depend on how many great hitters you have on your team, and the average number of hits they get per game. If your team is better at defense versus offense, you could also add in special sponsorships for pop-fly catches or strikes (for your pitcher). It’s important to take a look at your team’s skills and then price the different actions accordingly.
3. Offer special sponsorships for home runs. Depending on how often (or rare) home runs are for your team, you could offer a special home run packet that charges additional (and much larger) donations for home runs. If your team often hits home runs, you might not charge very much for a home run. But if a home run is quite rare, you could charge a lot of money for each one – making a donation is easy after a thrilling home run.
4. Create a list of fans, family members and friends. Your team should work together to compile a list of potential donors. Gather up information for the fans, family members, friends and potential sponsors for your hit-a-thon fundraiser so that you can easily send out an email blast (or other digital communication like social media) all at once. You could also ask that each team member offer up a minimum of ten emails (or more, depending on what you think is reasonable for your team members), so that you can ensure you have a large list of potential donors to pull from.
5. Send out an email blast and create flyers for your hit-a-thon.
You’ll definitely want a compelling email or printed flyer to let people know about your hit-a-thon fundraiser. It’s always important to make your communication personal; think about highlighting your players! Along with all the specifics about the event itself, make sure it’s very clear how potential donors can participate in the event. You can also ask potential donors and attendees to help you spread the word.
Learn more about how to manage all of your fundraising efforts on one digital platform, and sign up for your free Livingtree Give account today!