Most youth sports organizations run a voluntary product fundraiser to help meet operating expenses and thereby keep membership registration fees low.  This is a worthy objective since it makes a youth program more affordable and more accessible to families in your community, and everyone benefits from this.

However, not everyone understands the important role a sports fundraiser may play, and fundraising is surely nobody’s favorite activity.  Certainly, few people feel inclined to support more than one fundraiser for any particular organization and, with all the activities in which children are engaged, sometimes it is difficult for parents to support more than a couple of fundraisers each year.  The challenge for many youth organizations is to find a single fundraiser that will not only provide all of the funds needed to help cover the league's operational costs and keep registration fees to a minimum, but also one that will engender a high level of community acceptance and motivate people to participate. 

Truly unique sports fundraising ideas are difficult to come by.  Often, the search for the right revenue-generating idea is limited to a search for the right product to sell.  However, successful sports fundraising has less to do with product selection than it does with the way the fundraiser is conducted.  Think of it this way, you can put any commercial grade of gasoline in your car and it will run, but if all of your engine's pistons aren't firing, you may not get to where you want to go.  This is not to say that selecting fundraising products that are acceptable to your community is unimportant, but rather that even offering a great product is no guarantee of success.  If there was a single “right product”, everyone would be selling it.

Timing, incentives, and promotion usually play a much more important role in a fundraiser’s success.  They are, in effect, your fundraiser's engine.  (See Three Elements of Successful Sports Fundraising) 

A fundraiser’s financial success is very easy to measure.  It is simply measured by the amount of net profit that is generated.  Community acceptance, or the “likeability factor”, can be measured as well.  Subjectively measured, it is the verbal and non-verbal communication—the “buzz”—that accompanies the program.  But there is an objective measurement for a voluntary sports fundraising programs as well.  It is essentially the percentage of an organization’s members that demonstrate their support by actually participating in the fundraiser. 

If your organization’s voluntary fundraiser is currently supported by fewer than half of your members, then perhaps it is time to think about what it would take to get your members to participate.  Consider that the more people you have participating in your fundraiser (i.e., the more people who like and support your fundraiser), the greater will be the average number of items sold per participant.  “Percentage participation” and “number of items sold per seller” are “multipliers”.  That simply means that the resulting effect on the financial outcome of your sale is not the sum, but rather the product, of those two components.


The “Team & Family Night™” program was developed in the late 1990s by Champion Fundraising, Inc., and the executives of two professional sports organizations—a minor league baseball club and a men’s professional indoor soccer club.  It has since been run by many youth baseball and youth soccer organizations and has been hosted by several professional baseball and soccer clubs. 

The product you decide to sell is not the key to the success of a Team & Family Night™ program.  Nevertheless, with Team and Family Night™ you can select a pizza and cookie dough fundraiser, or a fundraiser comprised of these and other frozen food fundraising products, or you can select a discount card fundraiser.  (Food fundraisers and fundraising discount cards are the two most popular and productive programs in youth sports fundraising.) 

Although the products Champion offers are the best the fundraising industry has to offer, the product you decide to use will have little effect on the financial success of your Team & Family Night™ program.  Successful fundraising ideas have more to do with motivation than product. What is most important to the success of the program is the utilization of an annual sports entertainment event hosted by a nearby professional baseball or soccer organization.  This is what will create excitement for the event as well as the motivation to participate in your fundraiser.  In addition, your league takes ownership of an annual league-wide event.  To your community this event becomes your organization’s event; your league’s Team & Family Night™.

In a nutshell, the program is set up so the player's can earn a free ticket and transportation to a professional sporting event.  Block sections of seating are reserved so that teams can sit together (with family members behind them).  The kids get exposure to their game being played on the professional level, they share in each other's excitement, and they bring that excitement back to their sports league.  Of fundraising ideas for sports teams, nothing compares to a Team and Family Night™ program in excitement and in the fundraising revenue that is generated for the league. 

Most of the administrative details involved in the Team & Family Night™ program are handled by Champion and the front office of the host club.  For the sponsor (i.e., the youth organization) there isn't much more work involved than there is in a conventional youth sports fundraising program.  In addition, Champion subsidizes the cost of the event tickets—which the players earn in the fundraiser—as well as coach bus transportation to and from the host stadium. 

There is more to the Team & Family Night™ program than you can appreciate until your youth organization has experienced one.  However, once it has, several things will become readily apparent to you:  Most of your players and their families willingly participated in the program, your players shared an electrifying “team night” at a professional sporting event (and perhaps the accompanying fireworks show), and your Team & Family Night™ was deemed an extraordinary event that will be looked forward to with much anticipation succeeding years.   Not the least of benefits, your youth organization will have earned perhaps twice as much in profit than it would have earned with most conventional sports fundraising ideas.

To learn more about Team & Family Night™, click here.