Youth Workin' It

Consultancy and Resources for Youth Workers and Organizations Worldwide

Does Your Youth Group Take Credit Cards?

By Leave a Comment

Youth group credit cardsDon’t worry, I’m not suggesting young people should have to pay to be part of your youth work / youth ministry! Do you ever have times though where you wish that you could take credit card payments for some reason relating to your youth work:

  • When organizing trips
  • Taking payment for youth retreats, instead of having to insist they go old school by writing a check
  • At youth fundraiser events, instead of only accepting cash
  • Accepting donations

In the past, you’d need a merchant account with a bank, with a bulky card reader that needed to be plugged in, paying expensive monthly fees and transaction fees. In other words – never gonna happen.

Those days are no more

There’s a company called Square that was founded a couple of years ago by Jack Dorsey (who also created Twitter) and Jim McKelvey. Square offer a free card reader to businesses, sole traders and – most handily for us youth workers – non-profits.

The card reader has a 3.5mm jack connector that fits into your Android phone, iPhone or iPad where you’d normally put your headphones. You then download an app that enables you to start accepting payments straight away. It really is as simple as that.

I’d mentioned earlier that in the past, merchant accounts carried high monthly fees and transaction fees, but Square is far more reasonably priced. There are no monthly fees and you only pay a 2.75% transaction fee when physically swiping a card. You then have the person sign for the transaction on your phone (see the picture to the left). Watch people’s jaws drop when they see this in action!

You can also use the Square app to accept a credit card payment even when the cardholder isn’t with you. This might be because a parent has given their card number on a youth retreat registration form, or somebody has entered their card number on a donation form. The transaction fees when typing in a card number manually are slightly higher though, due to the extra risk incurred by Square in accepting these types of payments. However, the fees are only 3.5% + $0.15, so still not very high.

How much do the fees come out to?

So that you don’t have to do the math (and to give me an excuse to do some as I love math), here are some examples of payments you might want to take, along with how much the fees would be:

1) Payment of $50 for a trip to a theme park

  • Swiping: 2.75% fee = $1.38, so net amount taken is $48.62
  • Manual transaction: 3.5% fee = $1.75 + additional $0.15 fee totals $1.90, so net amount taken is $48.10

2) Payment of $150 for a youth retreat

  • Swiping: 2.75% fee = $4.13, so net amount taken is $145.87
  • Manual transaction: 3.5% fee = $5.25 + additional $0.15 fee totals $5.40, so net amount taken is $144.60

3) Donation of $25

  • Swiping: 2.75% fee = $0.69, so net amount taken is $24.31
  • Manual transaction: 3.5% fee = $0.88 + additional $0.15 fee totals $1.03, so net amount taken is $23.97

If it’s likely that most parents would want to pay by card for something like a youth retreat, you could add the cost of the transaction fees to the total cost per person. This would mean you maintain the same amount to spend in your budget, without having to cut back to compensate for the fees being taken out.

One other small benefit of the Square card reader is that you get a sign to display that you accept credit cards (see image to the right). This could come in handy if you have a garage sale fundraiser, Krispy Kreme fundraiser, car wash or something similar.

You can sign up for a free Square card reader here.

A couple of additional things:

  1. We don’t get anything out of recommending Square – I just think it’s a really cool payment option that could help other youth workers
  2. It’s only available in the US at the moment. However, given that Visa, Richard Branson and many others have invested in Square, it wouldn’t be surprising to see them go international over the next few years

Question: Have you used Square? What did you think? Let us know in the comments below.

You can also connect with us by:

  1. Signing up to receive our posts via email
  2. Following us on Twitter
  3. Liking us on Facebook
  4. Signing up to our RSS feed

 

How To Fundraise By Giving Money Away

By 2 Comments

Parable of the talents youth fundraiser
Spend money to make money with this youth fundraiser

Say what?! Fundraise by giving money away – isn’t that the opposite of what we’re trying to do with a youth group fundraiser?

Here’s how it works. Give each young person in your group a certain amount of money – $25, £10, €20 or however much you can allow for in the budget. The aim is for the youth to take this money and use it to raise even more funds.

Young people can be incredibly entrepreneurial, so they’ll probably surprise you with the novel ways they have of doing this youth fundraiser. If they struggle though, here are some ideas to get them started with fundraisers that only require a small amount of capital to run:

Encourage your youth to maximize the amount they raise by trying to find tandem fundraising opportunities. For example, on the Krispy Kreme fundraiser post we suggested youth also sell bottles of water. This is because 24 bottles can often be bought for approx $4 but sold for $1 each, so a profit of about $20 per case.

Youth could also pool their money if they wanted to run a fundraiser together. This would potentially open up even more opportunities, as they’d have more initial capital to spend on the project.

If your youth fundraiser is being run through a church, this could be done while also teaching about the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30).

Question: What other ideas would be good for this “Giving Money Away” youth fundraiser? Please let us know in the comments below.

You can also connect with us by:

  1. Signing up to receive our posts via email
  2. Following us on Twitter
  3. Liking us on Facebook
  4. Signing up to our RSS feed

 

How To Plan A Slum Survivor Weekend Retreat

By Leave a Comment

Image courtesy of newbeatphoto, Flickr

As we mentioned in Tuesday’s post and in our book, youth retreats are often organized by faith-based organizations, but they don’t have to be. You can run weekend sessions about any topic under the sun – or even beyond with a space-themed retreat weekend.

Normally on Thursdays we like to give you a youth work session plan idea that you can do, or one that will at least springboard your own session plan ideas. Today, we’ll be linking to a ‘pre-packaged’ youth retreat which includes all the information you might need to do an entire weekend of sessions and activities about its topic.

Organizations you can partner with

On Tuesday, we mentioned weekend retreat themes like learning about famine through World Vision’s 30-hour famine weekend, or about slum conditions by undertaking a weekend of Slum Survivor. The best part of these weekend youth retreat ideas is that they’re applicable to almost any kind of youth work you do. You can focus on any angle you wish, whether it’s faith-based or not. They also include all the items you might need to run their weekend-long program.

Slum Survivor currently have three different types of programming that you can download: Trafficking, Street Children and the Original Slum Survivor.

The Slum Survivor program also includes additional challenges to make the entire experience even more realistic.

  1. Paper Bag Making
  2. Literacy & Health
  3. Road Building
  4. Toy Making

Each provides its own list of resources and instructions within each youth work session plan idea – you can download these directly from the Slum Survivor site. You even get support in completing sponsorship forms, permissions slips, feedback forms and in dealing with the press.

One of the benefits of a Slum Survivor weekend is that your youth can use it to raise money to help others. Slum Survivor also want to know about your own weekend projects, so register your event with them so they can highlight what your youth did during the weekend youth retreat.

Update: If you live in Australia you can also access TEAR’s Slum Survivor events.

If you’ve run one of these projects before (or are planning to), we’d love to hear from you as well. How did your youth find it? Were they impacted by what life must be like for those less fortunate than them? Did you run any additional activities alongside the resources provided by Slum Survivor? Let us know in the comments below.

You can also connect with us by:

  1. Signing up to receive our posts via email
  2. Following us on Twitter
  3. Liking us on Facebook
  4. Signing up to our RSS feed

 

Recycling Cell Phones – Youth Group Fundraiser

By Leave a Comment

Recycling cell phones youth group fundraiser
Cha-ching!

Recycling cell phones is a great youth fundraiser as it can raise far higher sums of money than most other fundraisers do – more than you might imagine!

Many people upgrade their cell phones every year or two, so there are now lots of old phones lying around in houses not being used. An iPhone 3G S 32GB is worth $102, while a Blackberry Bold 9700 is worth £76.02 (amounts correct at time of writing). If you can get multiple cell phone donations, just imagine the total you’ll get for your youth fundraiser!

Here are five ways to get as many phones donated as possible when running a youth fundraiser recycling cell phones:

  1. Encourage your youth to bring in any cell phones they don’t use anymore
  2. Send a letter to their parents explaining the fundraiser and asking if they have any old phones they could donate
  3. Create flyers for parents to take into their workplace, encouraging their colleagues to donate their phones for recycling
  4. Contact local newspapers and ask if they’d be willing to do a feature on your fundraiser, including details of where readers can send their old phones to
  5. If you’re raising money for a church youth group, mention the youth fundraiser in a service
When raising money for something in particular (e.g. a youth retreat, minibus, sports equipment, etc), make this clear when advertising the fundraiser – people will be more likely to donate their old cell phone if they know exactly how it will benefit the youth.

Once you’ve had some cell phones donated, it’s time to convert them into cash for your youth work. There are many companies in the business of recycling cell phones, but try to make sure you’re using a reputable company first by searching for reviews of the company online.

In the US, two of the companies I’d deem trustworthy are Gazelle and Recellular. Another option is to recycle cell phones through Target – the money comes in the form of a Target gift card, but that might be OK if you’re fundraising for equipment you can buy there. In the UK, Envirofone and Mazuma Mobile are two of the biggest names (I’ve used Envirofone in the past and had no problems at all).

If you’re concerned about sending a whole bunch of cell phones to a company you’ve not heard of, consider sending one phone initially to see how smoothly the transaction goes. If it all goes OK, you could either send the rest of the phones in one batch, or split them out into several batches and send the next batch once you’ve received the check for the previous one. If you go down the Target route, you can actually take the phones into the store to arrange recycling.

You may end up having some phones donated that the cell phone recycling companies aren’t willing to offer any money for. If that’s the case, they’ll still usually be willing to recycle the phones anyway, or you could try selling them for a low price on eBay or Craigslist.

If you’ve found this useful, you might like our other youth group fundraising ideas here.

Question: What other ways can you think of to get as many cell phones donated as possible? Give your suggestions in the comments below.

You can also connect with us by:

  1. Signing up to receive our posts via email
  2. Following us on Twitter
  3. Liking us on Facebook
  4. Signing up to our RSS feed

 

Top Posts of 2011- #5 Sponsored Silence Youth Fundraiser

By Leave a Comment

Originally Posted: September 12, 2011

If you’re looking to do a youth group fundraiser, having them do a sponsored silence is a great way of raising money – parents will often pay good money to have their child be quiet for a day!

What’s a sponsored silence?

If you’ve not heard of this method of youth fundraising before, a sponsored silence is pretty self-explanatory – youth are sponsored to not say a single thing for a certain amount of time. It usually takes place over the space of 24 hours, but if you and your youth are feeling brave this could always be extended to 48 hours – it depends how well you think your young people might be able to hold their tongue!

The best way of having people donate is by asking them to sponsor a certain amount for every hour the young person can go without talking. That way, if the young person accidentally talks after 13 hours they’ll still raise some money, rather than if the sponsorship was contingent on them not speaking for a full 24 hours.

Sponsorship forms

To keep track of the youths’ fundraising, put together sponsorship forms that they can have people complete when they agree to be sponsors. This should have columns for the person’s name, address, phone number and how much they agree to sponsor per hour – the forms can be put together easily by inserting a table on Word with four columns and multiple rows.

Maximize the amount sponsored

Encourage your youth to explain to people the reason why they’re fundraising. If it’s thought to be a good cause, this will increase both the number of people willing to sponsor them and the amount that they’re willing to sponsor.

If your country allows, take advantage of tax benefits to increase the amount sponsored. For example, taxpayers in the UK are able to Gift Aid donations. Charities and religious organizations are able to reclaim the original tax amount paid by the person donating the money, increasing the amount donated by 25%. This means a donation of £50 results in the charity actually getting £62.50. To take advantage of this, include an extra column on the sponsorship form for people to tick that they’re a taxpayer.

Set the youth up for success

Not saying a single word all day is hard for anybody, especially young people! If possible, set them up for success by having a lock-in at your church or community center while they’re doing the sponsored silence. This really helps as they’ll be around others who aren’t talking, so there will be less temptation or opportunity to talk to people. Instead of calling it a lock-in, it could be renamed a “Shut Up” for this event!

Make it even more fun by turning the lock-in into a movie marathon. This has the added benefit of giving them even less reason or opportunity to say anything as they’ll be busy watching the movies.

Organize the sponsored silence over a weekend rather than during the week. Not only will this make it easier to hold a lock-in as it’s not a school night, it also means the young people won’t be around school friends who’ll be trying their hardest to make them talk!

Collecting money

The final step of this youth fundraiser is to collect the money from the sponsors. Print off certificates for all of the young people to confirm how many hours they stayed silent for. This will give them something to show the sponsors to prove how well they’ve done and should help encourage the sponsors to congratulate the youth.

You can connect with us by:

  1. Signing up to receive our posts via email
  2. Following us on Twitter
  3. Liking us on Facebook
  4. Signing up to our RSS feed