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Sports Fundraising Ideas: How Winning Teams Are Fundraising Differently

January 18, 2025
Sports Fundraising Ideas: How Winning Teams Are Fundraising Differently – Teamfi Blog: sports fundraising content, guides, freebies, and case studies.

Sports Fundraising Ideas: How Winning Teams Are Fundraising Differently

Every coach is looking to find ways for their team to win and build a successful program. So, naturally, coaches might find themselves asking What do the best coaches do? Logically, most of this question revolves around sport-specific, tactical items such as:

  • Scheme or plays
  • Approach to practice and development
  • Travel, recovery, and rest days

But, what if coaches asked this question about another crucial part of running a successful team: Fundraising. Fundraising, despite not being directly associated with wins and losses on the field, court, or diamond, can be a large part of a successful program.

So, we set out to answer this exact question: How are the winning teams fundraising? To get definitive answers, we asked 100+ coaches how they approach their team’s fundraising and differentiated between teams with a winning record the year prior and those with losing records the year prior.

The result? Three tangible, data-driven insights on how winning teams are fundraising on a yearly basis. Here they are:

Takeaway #1: Winning sports teams are NOT fundraising more frequently

Of the coaches we surveyed, 62% of them had a winning record the year prior. When asked how many fundraisers they ran that year, the average answer was 2.0 fundraisers among winning coaches.

For the 38% of coaches with a losing record the year prior? They were running an average of 2.3 fundraisers per year – over 0.3 fundraisers more on average than coaches with winning records!

These differences are visualized on the chart below:

Teamfi Blog: Chart showing the average number of fundraisers run per year by coaches with winning and losing records.
Coaches with winning records in our survey actually fundraised less than those with losing records.

Now the obvious question, what could be driving these differences? One theory could be that less experienced coaches may be trying more fundraisers to see what sticks. As time goes on and these coaches become more experienced, they zero-in on 2 fundraisers being able to fulfill their budgetary needs.

That’s just one idea, but it could explain the differences highlighted in the data we’ve collected.

Takeaway #2: Winning programs are not necessarily putting more work into their fundraising

Another question we asked in our survey of sports coaches was about distinguishing between the types of fundraisers they’re running. This is an important distinction because some fundraisers can be significantly more effort than others.

For example, the effort to organize and run a successful golf outing is a lot more than the effort of running a completely digital and automated crowdfunding campaign or calendar fundraiser in which you’re not providing value in return to fundraiser supporters. Side note: crowdfunding fundraisers were defined as the type where you’re sending outreaches and just asking for donations.

Teamfi Blog: Chart showing which styles of fundraisers sports coaches are running.
Crowdfunding fundraisers were the #1 style of fundraiser mentioned in our survey

So, logically you might think that winning teams are more likely to run the harder-to-organize fundraisers, leading to more fundraising success, and that newer coaches with less success opt for the easier fundraisers when just getting started, but that is completely false!

For the “easy to run” crowdfunding fundraiser, there’s actually no discernible differences between coaches with winning records and those with losing records. In fact, based on the data, coaches of winning teams are actually less likely to run more labor-intensive fundraisers such as golf outings, discount cards, and bake sales compared to their counterparts.

Teamfi Blog: Chart showing the differences in types of fundraisers run by coaches with winning records and those with losing records.
Both categories of coaches were just as likely to be running crowdfunding fundraisers

This might come as a surprise, but it's what’s consistent with our survey data above. So, not only do winning programs seem to fundraise less, but when they do fundraise they seem to run less labor-intense fundraisers as well.

Takeaway #3: Winning programs are getting more out of their camps and events

Based on the fundraising data collected, one interesting caveat to the “winning coaches are running less labor-intensive fundraisers” is that they’re actually seeming to get more fundraising dollars out of their camps and events – they were much more likely to mention an annual camp or tournament as a yearly fundraising pillar for their program.

Teamfi Blog:  A Second chart showing the differences in types of fundraisers run by coaches with winning records and those with losing records.
Notice how the green bars are larger for the ‘Camps’ and ‘Tournaments’ categories

What might drive this? Well, one hypothesis is that winning programs likely have higher participation, leading to camps and events being more fruitful fundraising options.  

Conclusion:

There you have it, 3 tangible takeaways from our survey of over 100 coaches across all sports:

  1. Winning sports teams are NOT fundraising more frequently
  2. Winning sports programs are not necessarily putting more work into their fundraising
  3. Winning programs are getting more out of their camps and events

Our hope is that by providing this survey, it will help you spur your team to some data-driven fundraising ideas leading to success both during the season and fundraising.

If you like content like this, be sure to check out our 100% free E-book, We Surveyed 100 Coaches About Sports Fundraising So You Don’t Have To, where we go even deeper into how coaches across the United States approach their team’s fundraising.

As always, with any survey, there’s always possible confounding variables that we didn’t cover. For example, winning programs might already be adequately resourced, making labor-intensive fundraisers less necessary, and this could be driving some of the results we’re observing.

Regardless, if you’re a coach reading this and you’d like to learn how to run a less labor-intensive and highly effective fundraiser for your program, you can book a <15 minute demo with the founder of Teamfi where we’ll run you through how Teamfi’s 100% free, completely digital, and automated fundraising options (such as Crowdfunding, Pick a Date to Donate Calendars, or customizable A-thon’s for any sport) will be the easiest fundraiser you’ve ever run.

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