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Joe Daniel / December 30, 2021

Football Fundraising Ideas | FBCP S10E19

Every coach is looking for the best football fundraising ideas. It’s part of the job. Regardless of your school size, being a good steward of the program’s finances is a key to success. 

Whether you’re trying to bring money in, or stop the flow of money going out, you need to be on top of the organization’s “check book” to ensure you have the finances to continuously be improving.

In this episode, learn the best football fundraising ideas for your team. Find out how to get control of finances, control how much you spend, and increase money coming into your program this season. 

The Purpose of Football Fundraising Ideas

  • Get a handle on your budget, first. You need to know where all the money is and where all the money is going before you start chasing new football fundraising ideas.
  • Coaches need to replace equipment as it wears out, and upgrade equipment when you can do it. 
  • Fundraising lets you take players to camps, 7 on 7 tournaments, and other team building events during the off-season. 

Equipment Inventory For Football Fundraising

  • Everything costs money, whether it be a game ball, kicking tee, or a jersey. Lost equipment is the easiest expense for football coaches to control.
  • Keep track of equipment that ages out, and how long cloth and other equipment lasts for your program. This is part of your budget.
  • If you can show the ability to take care of things you have, the people who sign checks may be more inclined to get you more nice things.
  • Learn the barcode system Coach Daniel used to cut down on equipment disappearing.

Football Fundraising Ideas

  • Create a calendar for the year. Spread your football fundraising ideas throughout the year. (see Coach Daniel’s calendar inside the Program Manual included for JDFB Coaching Systems clients) 
  • Use your resources. Parents, administrators, booster clubs and other sports and activities can help your fundraising.
  • Find out how you can raise more money by putting a purpose behind each football fundraising idea you use.
  • Football Fundraising Ideas we talk about in this episode include…
    • Lift-a-thon
    • Discount Cards
    • Car wash
    • “Flamingo Flock rooms/yards/houses” – insert your mascot
    • Partner with restaurants like Chipotle
    • Letters From Afar
    • Local Auction
    • Email List and Newsletter
    • QB/Touchdown Club
    • Grants
    • Golf Tournament
    • Clean Up

Related Links

  • Barcodes for helmets and shoulder pads that we purchased from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3ECz9l2
  • Put together your football off-season calendar with Season 10, Episode 11 of The Football Coaching Podcast: https://joedanielfootball.com/football-off-season/
  • In Episode 201 of The JDFB Quick Clinic, Coach Daniel lays out the core ideas for the Email Fundraiser: https://joedanielfootball.com/qc201/

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:44] Daniel Chamberlain: Welcome back, coaches, this is The Football Coaching Podcast. I’m Daniel Chamberlain here with Joe Daniel, as always.

[00:00:50] Joe Daniel: Hey, coach, how you doing?

[00:00:51] Daniel Chamberlain: Man doing good. I hope everybody had a merry Christmas. Happy Holidays! And we’re going to get back talking some football now. Tonight’s episode, we wanted to start talking fundraising. I know most people’s seasons have come to a close now. People who have won their championships or come very close. Or maybe some of you like me. It was done way ahead of time. But so now it’s time to start thinking about next year, reloading, getting the things that you need bought. And so we want to talk a little bit about how to make that money or keep that money in some ways to get those things done.

[00:01:25] Joe Daniel: Yeah, fundraising is interesting. And I don’t think in the past I’ve talked about some very specific fundraising ideas. I won’t necessarily, you know, I don’t I’m not going to get into those today. It’s just not possible. But I think what we want to talk about is like the approach to fundraising. I just feel like everybody gets in there and is like, Oh, we need, you know, we need to go out and do a bake sale because we’ve always done a bake sale. It’s like, Well, what are you just getting clear on the purpose of the fundraising and fundraising from different angles rather than doing what we’ve always done. We tend to not, you know, everybody goes, you can’t do what you’ve always done in football coaching because in your in your playbook, because if you’re just doing it, because you’ve always done it, that’s not a good enough reason. And it’s not. But then you go into fundraising and you’re like, I kind of hate fundraise. And like me personally, I hate fundraisers. I hate them every aspect of it. I hate it. And that’s why I’ve worked to come up with ideas to essentially avoid it. Not that that happens, but you can circumvent you can you can get around some of the things you don’t have to fundraise as much and be as panicked about it. And that’s what I want. That’s that’s what I think is the big idea today is we don’t have to do this because we’ve always done it. We don’t do it the way we’ve always done it.

[00:02:47] Daniel Chamberlain: Yeah, I’m right there with you on the fundraising. Not that I’ve had to do it a bunch. I have for other organizations and finding fun ways to do that is it’s hard. It seems like all the ideas have been used, but yeah, it’s just it’s one of those things that you have to do. It’s a necessary evil and it’s not generally a lot of fun, right?

[00:03:05] Joe Daniel: Yeah. And there’s ways there’s ways to avoid it now. There’s we were talking about this before we started. There’s companies that will come in and just essentially run your fundraising for you. You’re still going to need to deploy your little army of of fundraisers and motivate. And that’s that’s like the most the most painful part of this whole thing is like getting players to buy into this thing.

[00:03:25] Daniel Chamberlain: Yeah, everything really revolves around how much effort they put in and their high school kids. They want to go home and play call of duty and and text and Snapchat. So get them out of that world is just it’s tough enough. Tonight’s super important just because I don’t think it matters what size your school is. Just being a steward of your funds is a key to success. It’s very important. And sometimes, you know, we’re talking fundraisers right now and bringing that money in, but stopping money from going out is also going to be very important. And, you know, some will hit on it just a little bit. But regardless of your level of coach, whether you’re the head coach or athletic director that’s listening, an assistant coach, being a guy who’s responsible enough organized enough to really take care of the school’s finances, especially your program. I think it’s very, very important thing to have to understand. So first foremost, we would talk about why do we need it?

[00:04:15] Joe Daniel: Yeah. And before we get into it, I do want to mention JDFB Coaching Systems. Yeah, You get access right now for $1, go to join.joedanielfootball.com. We do talk and more and more in the offseason. Chalk talk calls will be starting up here again the next next week. As we get into January and get prepared for the off season, we do talk about fundraising and preparing your program. You know, all even though JDFB Coaching System is mainly five five coaching systems, offense and defense, a lot of what we do in the chalk talks is about program organization, fundraising, all of the other parts. So it is a it is a total look at your program and you get access for $1 right now going to join.joedanielfootball.com with, you know, why do we need to fundraise is an interesting question we all need. First of all, football is expensive like there is no sport. A lot of schools, not all a lot. And if you’re like a club program or you’re semi-pro or something like that semi-pro buy the equipment. But a lot of club programs and know your fundraising and a lot of our international clients are fundraising because you have to pay for all of this youth programs. A lot of you have to pay for all of this. If you’re a lot of school districts will cover the cost of the protective gear. And so the first thing that you have to do is know, like if you’re coming in as a head coach that was the first thing that I had to figure out, OK, what’s paid? What am I fundraising? Because when I first became head coach and I saw the numbers and luckily I knew, in fact the head coach that I was replacing as the head coach that I work for now. So a friend of mine, he was actually in the athletic director position at that time. I knew all the numbers. I wasn’t coming in like blind. Some of you guys will get a job where the previous guy, you know, got fired or was a real bad situation, and he’s gone and he ain’t helping nobody, you included and you’re coming in. And maybe it was kind of a mess. And the worst thing that you’ve got to do is you’ve got to get all of your numbers. And I see so many coaches in fundraising who don’t know your numbers. And to be quite honest, I come from a business mentality. By the time I got my first head coaching job, I was six years out of teaching or seven years out of teaching, six years out of teaching. So I’m at that point in a business mentality of I got to know what’s going out, what’s coming in like you said. And I couldn’t even get that. Even knowing the athletic director, a very supportive finance person in the front office. Having all of that, I still could not get those numbers. The finance person knew their numbers. The head coach going out knew his numbers. What he was doing at the same thing that I was like the finance person would pay for some stuff. There was some stuff coming out of this fund, the football fund, let’s say. Right. Then there was an athletics fund and athletics budget. Then there was stuff that the school board would vote on, and it infuriated me because I couldn’t just get the number. And so I think that the first thing that you need to do now, I worked and worked and worked and worked, and I basically wrote it off after a point said, OK, from this point on, these are the numbers because I can’t get we got New Jersey’s ordered new away jerseys that year and pants new uniforms. I was like the first thing I had to do was pick that stuff out, let the kids pick it out, whatever. And that was like $6000 or something like that. And I was I didn’t know, and I still I didn’t know where that was coming from. I didn’t understand I was. They were just like, you can get jerseys and I’m like, great. And I’m like, Well, what if I you’re you’ve you’ve worked with government like money doesn’t work the same for these entities, schools, government, military. It doesn’t work the same as money out in your family budget or in a business that you run by yourself like money doesn’t work the same. Money just comes from random places and it gets earmarked. And if it doesn’t get used for that, it doesn’t get you. And so I’m like, what if instead of getting the $6800 jerseys, I get the $5500 jerseys. And I take that other 1300 and I use it to buy some crap we actually need.

[00:08:39] Daniel Chamberlain: Right.

[00:08:41] Joe Daniel: But I was like, Well, what can I get with jerseys like anything you want? So I get the top of the line jerseys, didn’t need them, didn’t want them. So that’s you have to figure out. The first thing is you’ve got to start asking questions and know, know your numbers before anything else. I just think that’s that’s critical. You’ve got to know your numbers before you can start doing anything else to fundraise.

[00:09:01] Daniel Chamberlain: Yeah, because you don’t. I mean, you need two things need it where you’re starting and where you want to end up, right? And that’s that’s how you’re going to devise this plan of how much this crazy fundraising you really have to do. Like I said, the government does not. The the money is the biggest thing is the pools, right? Where like, where is that money going to come from? As a military guy, I can go to four schools a year and none of it will come out of the same purse like it’s all paid for by different people, depending on what my task is, right? So it’s kind of the same thing here in the earmarking and the use it or lose it money. And if I don’t use it all this year and the pot goes down next year because we obviously don’t need it, we it. It’s insane. Money is just absolutely insane at the government level. A lot of that need your numbers to be the same. In my time, very short amount of time. I feel like it’s it really should be the athletic director that’s taking care of this for you. Now you always need to ensure that you’re on top of it as well, because stuff happens, right? Just like a head coach got fired when you took the job or left, that athletic director may do the same thing, but I’ve seen two different sides of that coin, and I’ve seen an athletic director that was the A.D. because he was the coach that had been around the longest. And he had been around the longest because he was in a comfortable little place where there wasn’t the expectations. And so that’s why he was there. Right. And so that guy’s not going to do this job for you. He he’s going to continue getting paid to do what he does. And I mean, it’s just a stipend do. It’s not like he’s getting superintended money here. So and then I’ve had a pretty decent one that was on top of it ensured that everybody’s fundraisers went through him and he really kept things go when it kept it fair if you did the work and made the money. And that’s just how it went. You got to spend it as well. So.

[00:10:36] Joe Daniel: And the situation I was talking about, like I said, it was great coming in because the head coach was worked, was operating as the athletic director. The downside was he was on his way to another school, so we transitioned and everybody, luckily this was a small school. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody got along. And so as he’s helping me transition, he’s helping the new AD transition too. So he’s probably the one getting the worst end of it, right? And then we’re like, he’s helping us all kind of, he’s he’s taking a job that he was doing everything on his own and probably not doing it as good as it could be done because it was more than one person should be doing and giving me the information that I need, giving the the new athletic director the information that they need and figuring it all out. But you’re right, everybody’s situation is going to be different. You may come in and everything is just spot on done and you don’t have to go through all of this. But my experience is you probably won’t. You probably will come in there and everything’s a mess. So then we go to why do we need to know all this? Why do we need to? You know, why do we need to fundraise? I very strongly think that you’ve got to have a purpose for everything that you do. There’s all these things now, Kickstarter GoFundMe is a big thing, right? Go. And we’ll talk about this in the fundraising. I see coaches who are like, I’ve seen GoFundMe and I get emails. I’m on a lot of people’s email list because I emailed them and so they email me. And it’s cool because I got somebody to delete some for me. Not that I not that I don’t care. But guys, I can’t. I can’t donate to all your programs. Okay? But sometimes I do read those emails and just interested. And a lot of times are not asking for anything other than money. And Daniel, you talked about this before we came on, like having a fundraiser that just asked for money. It may do OK, but there’s two things I think that are important here. There’s a little bit of a like you’re going to fill the space that’s allotted type of thing, like if you have three hours to do a job, you’re going to you’re going to get it’s going to take three hours. If you need $1200 to buy game balls, let’s just say, you know, I know it’s paid for a lot of places, but let’s say you need $1200 by game. I believe you’ll raise $1200. You may blow it out of the water. What if you just go out there and are like, Hey, we’re having a bake sale? Why? Because football and OK. How much money do you need money, right? But like, like here’s the thing, if you go into that bake sale and I’m not encouraging anybody to have a bake sale, I’ve never done that. If you go to that bake sale, here’s what I know. Assuming that all of your parents, assuming that any of your parents have money and some people are in places where that’s not true, but most of us have, you know, a mix of parents. We have some parents who’ve got money and some parents who don’t. We’ve got some parents who construct check where their company can stroke a check. And like, if you go into it and say, I need $1200 and you get to the end of the day, here’s what’s going to happen. And you say, I need $1200 or even better, I need $1,246.57 because that’s the bill that we have from the from from, you know, our BSN or whoever you have, right? And that’s the that’s the bill. But that’s the quote that they gave me. And I need that so I can pay that. And you go into that. Dude at the end of it, a parent comes up and goes, Hey, did you get enough? And you go, didn’t go that well, we got $836 now. Parents like write a check $400 right now that actually happens if as you were organized, you understood what you were trying to do.

[00:14:12] Daniel Chamberlain: Yep. People can see an end goal and they’re more likely to go, Can I? Can I get this whole thing? Can I be the family that does the whole thing? I understand that we look at stuff like that right now. Right, that’s

[00:14:24] Joe Daniel: Exactly. You look. You look at ways that you can, Do I want to throw money into the ether and just hope that it helps football program? Not really. Do I want to buy T-shirts for the kids? Not really. Do I want to help them upgrade the weight room because the bars are rusted and you know, the we need new equipment and I can see or I’ve seen, I mean, you could be a big, you know, a big weight room upgrade and you can show them that concept art, that the weight room upgrade and you go, Hey, I’ll pay for all the bars like somebody. Somebody out there may want to do that. They do not just want to throw money randomly at things. If I’m donating to something like if someone is donating to your program, do they want to give you a $100 check? Or do they want to walk into the weight room next season and go I bought those bars.

[00:15:15] Daniel Chamberlain: Yep, that’s where they want to be.

[00:15:17] Joe Daniel: So I mean, the things that we’re trying to upgrade, I mean, I think a lot of us and maybe not everywhere, but a lot of us, jerseys and stuff like that are covered by like booster or something along those lines. They’re kind of I know with a lot of school districts, they’re built in because it’s just it’s a known expense. We know with football we’re going to get new jersey every two years, three years, whatever. And you know, you pass them down the line to your JV program. Helmets, we know we’ve got to bring in new helmets and that kind of stuff. Don’t do this. Tell you what I’m dealing with, what we’re dealing with at the school that I’m at.

[00:15:48] Daniel Chamberlain: You’re about to tell my story, not mine. It’s yours, but I bet it’s the same.

[00:15:51] Joe Daniel: Maybe. Our school got 55 brand new helmets donated. It was the year that I was. It was the year that I was coaching, that I was the head coach because I came because I didn’t have enough helmets and I came to the school and the head coach there was a friend of mine who just gave gave me the all helmets because we just got 55 helmets donated. Helmets have a 10 year run, right? Well, they didn’t buy any new helmets for the next three years. So either you’re hoping in X number now we need more helmets and 55 to either you’re hoping in 10 years that somebody else buys 55 helmets. And this was like, again, this was one of those like somebody with money was just like, I want to help the program. What do you need? Like helmets like great check 55 helmets. So you got to plan this over time. But you know, helmets, the reconditioning, all that kind of stuff. I think a lot of that’s included. But if it’s not, make sure you’re planning for it.

[00:16:41] Daniel Chamberlain: We had a way to make a plan for that a couple of years ago, and that was I don’t really know how they didn’t. They hadn’t bought any helmets in years, and I want to say we pushed 120 helmets or something into the dumpster like awesome. And I’m not so sure that some of them were out when we used them. We just didn’t know, right? I mean, you don’t, right? It was that lack of the turnover of coaches. I think it was like three coaches in five years or something. And then it was just one of those things. A hard place to be. Very, very much so. And then we’re trying to get an face mask and chin straps and helmets and everything in it. Man, that can be a big bill quick. So you hope that’s

[00:17:18] Joe Daniel: That’s an additional cost with those is like because I think we we tend to buy like I feel like a lot of coaches buy random helmets, right? Especially when you have a lot of turnover. This coach comes in and he goes, I like the Revo Speed. I don’t know the names of helmets, but there’s a speed, right? There’s like a Speed and there’s a whatever. So one coach comes in and he’s like, I don’t know what the first guy is like. I like Schutt, right? So he buys Schutt helmets. The next guy’s, I like the Revo. And I think there are two super ones Revo, Revo Speed or whatever, whatever they are. There’s like there’s a bunch of different helmet, but like, you know, one guy wants Speed. One guy wants a Schutt. One guy wants, you know, well, we got to have additional equipment for every single one of those, right, where we’re running around looking for, first of all, we carry like four helmet kits to a game now.

[00:18:04] Daniel Chamberlain: Yeah, because universally more right, it’s all. It’s all so individualized. You’re talking chinstrap. They don’t all connect the same earpieces. God forbid you break an earpiece in the middle of a game. Face masks, like all the connections, it’s insane. Yeah, I understand. Like, I feel like we’re all feeling that pain. Everyone listening as well, I’m sure.

[00:18:23] Joe Daniel: So, you know, we getting passed. You know, that’s the equipment that we need and we need to know. And I think without getting too far into it, that’s the kind of stuff that you can kind of reduce your costs, which we can talk about in a minute here. But just having a plan sit down at the beginning of your off season and say, OK, here’s the money that we have right now. Here are the things that we need. Here are the things that we are going to get paid for and go and say, You know, what’s the school board going to pay for? What’s the county going to pay for the city? What’s what’s the athletic budget? Because, you know, there’s there’s a football budget and an athletic budget. The weight room probably comes out of out of an athletic budget. Maybe upgrades to the locker room come out of an athletic budget because maybe soccer uses it in the spring or whatever however it works for you. You know, I know a lot of times we have like a bar scene and JV locker room, but in the off season, it’s like, you know, in the in the spring, it’s a boys and girls soccer locker room or whatever. So that’s an athletic budget. No. How much you know what’s going to come out of all these things? Bigger. All of that out. Do we need to upgrade or can we make upgrades in the weight room, in facilities and your field house bigger? All of those things out and I think prioritize them. Like, know what you can, you know, look anybody who’s listening to this, who is married or has a girlfriend or whatever. You understand how house honors works, right? Not house owners. What’s the one where they are and don’t act like you don’t know what’s the one where they where they come in and they are. They like, do the love it or list it?

[00:20:00] Daniel Chamberlain: I’m pretty sure this is HGTV type stuff. This is they can be honest with you, man. I can’t. It’s too commercialized now. Okay.

[00:20:08] Joe Daniel: All right. Two types of people people who watch HGTV and liars. That’s cool.

[00:20:16] Daniel Chamberlain: I love it. I will say that trying to push through this why you need fundraising. Don’t forget to invest back into the program. I mean, we’re talking about necessities, right? The safety equipment. You have to wear a jersey to go out there. This past year, I noticed that our headsets were junk right and their batteries are dying half way to the game. And you can never have enough batteries and your camera equipment is always trash. And that’s stuff that you it’s a peripheral look. You overlook it. Very easily. So don’t don’t forget about that stuff. I know this year. Whatever reason, funding wise, we passed on buying the coach’s pants. What was it all new coaching staff? So we all had different shades of pants on out there, which isn’t that big of a deal.

[00:20:51] Joe Daniel: You get coaching pants? I never got coaching pants.

[00:20:53] Daniel Chamberlain: Well, you know, if you all want to look the same, that’s generally it. But as thing, we didn’t. And I live in small town America, so trying to find a source for those was near impossible. But the biggest thing is putting back into the kids. I know not everybody likes 7 on 7. Some people, like the coach I had this year did not like, nope, not going to go there. It doesn’t help my offense. We’re going to run Flex Bone, Ok cool, we never throw the ball. My defense could use it, though. But camps, tournaments, anything you can take your players out to, you know, we tried to reward. I was the the head weight room guy this year as well, and I really wanted to reward people who showed up all the time with something. So we had scheduled a steak dinner. I hope that they eventually got their steak dinner. So these are things that we were trying to invest back into the players because every day is that there’s the old adage every is an interview, right? You’re always interviewing for the job you have or the next one, whatever. But also everybody’s recruiting day. So if you really want to recruit the hallways, treat the kids right, and you can do that by investing back in them and the success they go on to play in a D1 school or they go on to play in the NFL. It’s going to bring kids back into your program. So don’t overlook the peripherals, don’t overlook the kids. But those are two really big wise.

[00:22:02] Joe Daniel: Those things mean a lot to not just players, but the coaches too. And you’re right with the one thing I’ll say is you’re right with the new coaching staff. I know that when I come in, I hate coming into a new program and I’m like, I’m just wearing like whatever I can find. I’ll like, go buy some great, you know? One thing I learned coaching college, so much movement, especially in small colleges, and I was a juco level. And there’s so much movement for those coaches that they just have like a drawer full of gray shirts so that when they get the next job, they’ve just got some great shirts, great great sweats, whatever that they can throw it, you know, with nothing on you go to Walmart, buy the ones that have nothing on them

[00:22:43] Daniel Chamberlain: Black and gray, right? It works for every color scheme.

[00:22:46] Joe Daniel: Yeah. And I mean, you just have a stack of those. But like one of the things that I liked in that environment was we got there another lot more booster money there. But they gave us, one of the first things I got was five T-shirts and there was there were five colors and it was like, you wear this one on Monday, and I don’t necessarily like you wear this one on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. But we had a coaching uniform. But I had five shirts and then I got a sweatshirt, I got a jacket and I got all that. It actually does mean something for those things, but anyway, I don’t overlook it. But still, helmets are a priority. You know, getting the things your program needs is a priority first.

[00:23:22] Daniel Chamberlain: So you’re talking, you know, they had something to give you, when I came on here, to Jay, that was so last year, I did not have. There wasn’t a hand me down to a really it was they bought everything new. Now, I don’t know if they just had a little bit deeper pocket. Maybe there was a booster or something that paid, but I got, you know, two or three shirts, a jacket, pair of pants, pair of shoes like Friday night and all through the practice week. And I had some clothes to wear. I came to Jay and it was more of a hand-me-down system, so it was like, Hey, go in the back room. Every coach that leaves has to turn in all their stuff. It’s back there. Go dig through it and get whatever size you wear. It wasn’t even sorted, right? Because we’re not going to take time to do that. So that was excellent. And that really came down to kind of our next topic, which is equipment inventory in it. It was way for the school to save money because they didn’t have to buy a coach something new every year. I mean, we got some shirts, right? We had a couple of practice shirts, ball and a game shirt because, you know, whatever your style is, I’ve been on a we’re going to wear a vest or a windbreaker type jacket, and I’ve been on. We’re going to wear polo and slacks type coaching staff. But equipment inventory is something that you can use to ensure that you’re not wasting that money that you’re trying to raise, and it starts with the kids safety equipment. It starts with jerseys because every senior out there wants to sneak in and run off with their game jersey because that’s what we do for sure. I have a home and a way around here somewhere

[00:24:43] Daniel Chamberlain: I’ve got mine that was given, it was gifted to me. I also got my helmet because it was aging out.

[00:24:48] Daniel Chamberlain: And so, you know, I’ve seen two different methods of this and you know, you’ll get yours and the way that you like to see it done. Coach last year, he just had his wife do it all, and that was a great resource for him. She was also a teacher at the school, so it wasn’t. She didn’t have a 9:00 to 5:00 somewhere else, so she could kind of be around, you know, she had the same planning period as all the other teachers. So that was something allowed her to be there to help. And so she took care of it all. And I’m talking right now and mainly sizes, right sizes, everything. Everybody took whether it was socks. I’ve never seen practice clothes. That’s something that since I played bowls changed. We didn’t check out practice clothes and then you had to check it back in at the end of the year. We just had cheap cotton T-shirts, and the old crappy mesh shorts made, it had your number on it and you wore your game number to practice every day like that was just and you kept it. I’m pretty sure I have. Three repairs of mesh shorts around here somewhere. Because I’m that guy. But, you know, nowadays clothes are starting to cost more. Everybody Under Armour, Nike or Adidas, so having the ability to check those things out and get that number back is as big time. But being able to inventory what you have, replace the things you need, especially if you’re coming in your first year and then knowing who has what at all times. All right. And it’s probably just the military to me that thinks that’s so important because then I have to check out everything. Now we have items that don’t have to come back. Once I start wearing, basically if it touches your skin, you’re not turning it in. So my uniforms, my t-shirts, socks, all that stuff, you know, once it’s issued, it’s mine. They need to track that. They did give me some, but it’s mine. I don’t have to give that back. But we have a lot of high dollar stuff out there that, you know, a bag that costs 300 bucks, or something stupid. I had to buy that over and over again. It’s insane. And I think football coaches should really take that same mentality. And if it is practice closed because they’re expensive now, you need those back then start there. And every piece should be checked out and check back in.

[00:26:39] Joe Daniel: If you don’t inventory your stuff, you will be. If you don’t take this seriously, you will be amazed at how m uch stuff will walk away. And it will. If you are not doing this, your program is probably hemorrhaging money. I’m talking game jerseys that are, you know, $80 or whatever game pants practice pants that are 10 or $20. No big deal. And you know, the most frustrating one is the absolute least, the one that the coaches seem to be the most up in arms about, sometimes because it happens so much as mouthpieces like kids just eat mouthpieces. Mouthpieces cause less than a dollar. Yeah. So I would go by. I know that I been, you know, I understand the frustration with it, but I had been in so many programs where the mouthpieces was like, Oh, you know, you got to pay a dollar to get a mouthpiece. And I called up our rep when I became a head coach and I said, I need this, this, this and this and I mean mouthpieces. And I said, How much are mouthpieces? And it was like ten bucks for 75 or something. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t very expensive. And I’m sitting here looking at all these checks for $6000 and $7000, $10000 for helmets. And I’m like, we had 27 bars. We have 50 kids in the program total. I was like, Send me 200, 250 or something like that. And I just don’t care if a kid asks for a mouthpiece. Like, I just don’t care half about to get special ones because I got braces and stuff anyway. So they don’t use your mouthpiece.

[00:28:11] Daniel Chamberlain: You know, they all want the new fancy with like the breakthrough or the need to look like the the tiger teeth or

[00:28:16] Joe Daniel: Yeah, yeah. So anyway, the big thing is you have to take it seriously, and I’m sure that the military does a good job of this. And I’m sure that if you have a resource like that, like a coach’s wife who can, who will take it and run with it, our coaches girlfriend will take it and run with it. But if you don’t and you just got a bunch of guys and they don’t want to do this stuff, we still have to do it. I have talked about our equipment inventory and what we did, and I I can. I will talk about it. People will ask me over and over again if we do, if we do inventory everything this year. In this way, our head coach has talked about it. But if we do do all this, then I’ll take pictures and video and whatever, and I’ll post it up for our JDFB Coaching Systems. But it’s essentially this there’s a link that I’ll put in the show notes. I ordered a roll. It was $76 for 500 barcodes and you could get them custom printed. So they said this was when I was at Amelia High School. They said property of Miller High School and I had a basket and that those stickers went inside every helmet and on the the breastplate of every pair of shoulder pads with the back of every pair of shoulder pads. And then I bought a barcode reader, you can buy barcode readers, USB barcode readers. They just plug in your computer and you zap something and it spits out whatever that barcode number is. And all that barcode is a coded number. It’s the same number that’s printed on there, and you click that and it goes boop, and it spits that out to wherever you are. So if you’re in a Google sheet, it spits out what that barcode number is. Here’s the thing. These barcodes were no some random number sequence zero zero one through. You know this long random number sequence swab. There’s long random number sequence. And then the last three digits were zero zero one, and then the last three digits went up from zero zero one to five. Everything else was the same, so it was just a number. It was just one two three four. That was it. That was what. Having that spreadsheet, having that kid bring those over and having someone go big, that makes it real. Kids are like, Oh, this is serious. This dude’s got a barcode. It means more than just writing down one. I took the same thing I would, I would strongly recommend everybody do that first. Can’t find your helmet. All right. I have my phone with the spreadsheet. I pull my phone out the phone has the number on the helmet. I don’t need the barcode reader, the numbers on the barcode and I can pull the helmet, I can just say everyone pop your helmet off. Look at your barcode who has zero six seven? That’s Tommy’s helmet. Where’s your helmet? Geek. Then we went and we bought. I bought these iron-on barcodes. They don’t work on practice pants, but practice pants, $10 a pair, $20 a pair, whatever they are. We were having to buy an entire team set of practice pants every year. They just walk away. Kids are like, why would you take them home to wash. First of all, you don’t take anything home to wash it. You don’t own it. You want to take your practice pants home and wash them go buy practice pants, and then I’ll still put a barcode in it because somebody is going to steal them eventually, right? By the way, this cuts down on that problem, too. I bought iron on. But what I would do is I would buy the sew-in and I will find somebody in your community who can so and I would ask them/pay them to sew labels. You only have to do this one time. OK, remember, once you bought, By the way, companies will come and do this for you, and they will charge you thousands and thousands of dollars. I’m talking about maybe a 200 dollar investment walk at the pay. Somebody just sewn them in, but once they’re sewn in, they’re sewn in. Then maybe you go back to that person every year with 10 new pairs of pants and say sew this in. I barcoded everything that you could put a bar code in if you could stick or so a barcode on it, barcode it and went boop boop. And so they they go through the, you know, your, you know, your first day when they’re getting all their equipment and then they come in and I’m the last person they see. And I also made them do the the creed for the program to recite that back before they could get all their equipment, because that was important. But they come into that and I’m sitting there on the spreadsheet going, Boop boop boop boop boop boop zapping all their stuff in, anything that I couldn’t put a barcode on, knee pads as an example, you know, the knee pads now are about the size of a silver dollar. They’ve got holes drilled into them. I don’t even know what the point is. I just wrote their locker number on that. And what you do is you put the year in the locker number, so you’re going to put 22-47. OK, that’s 2022, locker 47. That way, when I find on the floor, I can throw it in a locker so that it’s there and then I’ll make a run for it tomorrow, right? They’ve got to be. I’m not going to. I’m not going to pick your stuff up for you without you paying it back. But everything, you know, girls. So a solo thing in there, if it’s not, if it’s their girdle, I would still either so or right or something because again, same reason is going to get left on the ground because they didn’t pay for that girl. So they don’t really care about it. But people will still ask me and still do over and over again about this inventory system. And again, I will if we video it or whatever. But guys, it’s not complicated. I’ll put the link for the, buy some bar codes, bar code everything. They can get a barcode in it. If you can’t put a barcode on it, then write 22- and their locker number or 22- and their jersey number. Like, obviously I don’t need like this is one thing that that actually occurred to me. I was like, How am I going? Get a barcode on these practice jerseys? And then it occurred to me. They already have a number on them, so I don’t need to put numbers on stuff that already has a number on it. Like, if I just jersey number 36 is late, but make sure that you record it and say this kid has number 36 and they’ll go switch jerseys and I’ll go the freak off. It’s not yours, so you can’t trade it. It’s checked out to you if you want to. That’s cool. Come see me. But if I find jersey 36 on the floor and you know, here’s what would happen. All right, Jersey number 36 gets left on the floor. In the locker room, I pick up jersey number 36. I put it in locker of the person who’s supposed to be wearing jersey number 36. All right. He’s going to run for it tomorrow as a team. I don’t have time to figure out all this stuff. There were five things left on the floor. We got five, whatever right. I put jersey number 36 in the locker of whoever is supposed to have Jersey number 36 the next day. Whoever is supposed to have jersey number 36, isn’t on practice? He’s taken a test. He’s going to be late for practice finishing a test, OK? But the kid who’s supposed to be wearing jersey number 36 is there or who traded for it or whatever. And his jersey is now locked in another kids locker. That’s the stuff that happens, you know, but this is you need to do this because what it does is it makes it serious. You talk about the military. You know, this is not your stuff. This stuff is checked out to you. And at the end of the year, I don’t buy the thing where people are like, we’re not going to graduate. If you don’t bring back your belt from your uniform, you do need to put something on the belts. So it’s something on the belt, it’s a pain in the butt. By the way, I would also buy laundry loops, the little laundry loops so that everything’s so they put everything in snap the loop. Drop it in, they go, well, my whatever is not in there, your loop.

[00:35:43] Daniel Chamberlain: Who made your look this morning?

[00:35:45] Joe Daniel: It’ll still happen. All this stuff will still happen, but I have had put them on the outside like the pants. So that barcode on the outside, because you can’t have all kids dropped pants on the practice field when one kid doesn’t have, one kid says my practice pants is missing. All right, everybody get a partner and look at each other’s barcodes and see who has 72 on. You need to do it. Yeah, you just need everything. And the show again, you can take a marker and just you could do this on the pants and all that sort of stuff. And just write 22 -11 and you can number up everything you know, whatever their number is or however you want to do it, and that would be fine. The show of these barcodes lets the kids know and you’re talking about two hundred and fifty. Mine was all out of pocket, by the way, but it saved me a ton of effort. You’re talking about 200, 300, maybe 500. You have somebody selling all these things going on, how big your team is, all that sort of stuff. You’re going to want to get some extras because next year you’re going get new shoulder pads. But the show of all of this stuff on there and again, you only have to set it up once, the kids know it’s serious. Absolutely. And that’s the key.

[00:36:55] Daniel Chamberlain: And I think some accountability is the biggest reason we’ve been named so far. Everyone’s accountable for their own thing. You’re accountable for the stuff that the program owns. The kids are accountable for the thing they’ve been checked out. That’s huge. But also, you can you can tie safety into it. And if you don’t try to take this as a high school board, we need this done for us. So it’s not out of pocket. You can always put you to safety. If you’ve got a

[00:37:17] Joe Daniel: You don’t want kids wearing a helmet that wasn’t fitted to them, right?

[00:37:21] Daniel Chamberlain: Yes, you’ve got a database for these things, you can start aging it. Right. So now I know this helmet came in. I can track this exact helmet by barcode. This the year we purchased it. This year, it has to go out, you know, and eventually you’ve got an entire database built. Not hard, take a few classes and excel. It’s pretty easy. YouTube can do everything for you now or teach you to do it, I should say.

[00:37:40] Joe Daniel: Just find somebody who knows if you’ve got somebody who knows it and you’re right, you can do things like I had the I had the helmets all in there and the shoulder pads. And when a kid with the year and when a kid got up to the last year, their equipment would have a highlight on it, knowing that when this kid brings his helmet in, I don’t need to check it in, right? Cool. Thanks.

[00:38:00] Daniel Chamberlain: Yep. If we know where that goes. Also can just kind of make sure that you’re using all your equipment. I say evenly. I don’t know how many extra helmets each team has. You know, I’ve been at places where we had several. I’ve been places where we had 200 helmets in a stinking closet and I’m like, what are all these helmets for? Obviously, your new helmets each year, you’re probably going to put into the rotation. Seniors are going to want them all your, you know, star athletes. You’re going to want the new coolest helmet on the market. But the ones that are in that mid-range, you can kind of ensure they’re being used evenly, make sure kids are wearing them. They’re not just that over gaining dust until they hit their 10th year and you’re throwing them away and you’re like, Oh, we literally never took the tag off this. But also, this is probably the biggest one in my career, as I’ve taken many, many, many different career paths, but something it’s pretty universal as if you showed the ability to take care of something. You showed the ability to take an old company truck and just keep it nice or whatever it is, right? If you always are trying to take care of whatever small thing you have, people tend to want to give you the next better thing. So if you can come into a program or maybe you already had a program, you’ve been there a few years. But hey, we don’t have the nicer stuff, but it’s always taken care of. We’re always very accountable for it. We’re not losing jerseys. Our weight room is always cleaned up and put away. We know what weights are, where then the people who are writing the checks are more going to be more inclined to help you out when you need something new. Hey, I would like to do a weight room expansion. You know, we would like some more. What is the Riddell helmets is the new big thing. Everybody wants a speed flex, whatever it is. And so those are once again every day’s an interview. So now you’ve hit, you’ve pitched yourself. This whole time I’ve taken the small what we had. We’re a small school. We don’t have a lot of money. We’ve kept things nice. We’ve kept things in order. Now it’s time we can step up to the next better thing and people are going to be more inclined to do that for you. So, you know, a few different reasons why you need to take inventory. I don’t know that anyone is more important than the others, but they’re all pretty important stuff.

[00:39:53] Joe Daniel: Yeah. And that goes back to just when you do go ask for money, let’s say that you’re asking, you know, your school board or whatever, and you go ahead and you say, I’ll go back to the practice pants because that’s is such a disastrous practice pants

[00:40:05] Daniel Chamberlain: Hey, I wonder I was going to ask you who hurt your practice pants?

[00:40:08] Joe Daniel: Yeah, I mean, practice pants issues. We if I can come in there, let me tell you, I was I think it was knee pads. It was knee pads, an entire track that the knee pads were all stored in a trash can, right? A lot of people do that. You know, one of the trash cans got thrown off every knee pad in the program got thrown out. This was not this. This was an issue. And there was there was a lot of issues in that, even from the foundation of how the equipment storage was set up. It was not secure. And so from the top, this thing was not from from from up from a foundational level. It was doomed to fail and that’s why I had to go to such a level. But just take a break. Just for example, if I can come into you and say, Hey, if I come to you at the end of the season or, you know, for one fundraising going to go ahead, you know, one of the things I need money for is practice pants. We need 45 pairs of practice pants because they were in a bag and somebody threw them out. They’re start better plan that big sale, dude. I commend you and say I need nine pairs of practice pants because they just aged out. You know they’re ripped. I had 9 pairs ripped. Not a single pair was lost. I can show you all nine pairs and how they’re just destroyed because it’s football. Like, OK, who can argue with that? Like, who can? Who can argue with that? I just need to replace the things that wore out. If you’re going to be a lot more likely to get what you need.

[00:41:32] Daniel Chamberlain: What’s funny is the exact system that you’re talking about with the bar codes. We’re at the Oklahoma High School Football Association clinic last summer, and somebody had been nominated for president or whatever it was that the next group of people was coming in right, nominating and voting in. And that’s why the guy got the job. He got voted out, and I don’t know if he won it or not. I’m sure it’s a lot of extra burden on him. But the very first thing that the guy who nominated him said was, Listen, I’m a head, high school head football coach. He’s my assistant. He’s worth his weight in gold. The very first thing he did when he stepped in the door was started an inventory, but he’s put in barcodes on stuff and I’m like, Why? I don’t need to check out that helmet. I can see the helmet on the kid. But it was just pretty funny that we’re talking about this and it literally got the guy another job. And, you know, maybe that’s just networking. Like I said, I don’t know what it paid or if I paid anything, but if it’s an achievement for him and it’s something he can write on his resume and it helps in the future like it. Just continue, always building, always building your own, your own resume. So it’s it’s pretty neat and it all started off of equipment inventory.

[00:42:34] Joe Daniel: Yeah. And if you are, you know, you maybe listening to this going, well, I’m not a head coach. Hey, coach, don’t want to do this. So if you’re at the bottom of the totem pole and you want to make yourself valuable and kind of lock yourself in and be considered for other jobs in the future, both at the, you know, working your way up through the school that you’re at and also, you know, having a resume where, like I did, if you saved your football program money, that’s up. How many assistant coaches can say that

[00:43:02] Daniel Chamberlain: Job security man, what I do this a lot of them, right?

[00:43:04] Joe Daniel: Yeah, not a lot of them can say . So if you come in and say, Hey, man, I look, I see we have a deal with this, I’m going to take over like I wouldn’t take over fundraising because again, I hate it. We’re about to talk. We’re going to talk about fundraising next. I hate it. But I would take this because I don’t mind this aspect. And to me, this is the other end of fundraising when I look at it, when I look at it as a business, and I talked at the beginning about the reason that I took this approach is I look at it as a business. It’s what’s coming in and what’s going out, what I need to know. My numbers and what I could see immediately was we didn’t know what was going out, but too much was going out and not enough was coming in. And it’s to me, it sucks to fundraise, but I have to fundraise less if I say,

[00:43:48] Daniel Chamberlain: Yep, everything you don’t lose, you don’t have to buy, right? It’s just one extra dollar, extra phone call or discount card or whatever. So it’s it’s it’s worth it’s worth its time to just get it started. And, you know, like Joe just said, if you’re listening and you’re an assistant coach, maybe your first year, second year, your linebackers coach or wide receivers coach and it’s something you can always take over, pitched the idea. Some head coach may not let you. He may not want to deal with it. He may say no, it works fine, but I have a feeling most of them are going to like, that’s fine. Save us some money.

[00:44:17] Joe Daniel: Yeah, very few coaches are going to be like, you can’t take over the equipment inventory, man. That’s my baby.

[00:44:25] Daniel Chamberlain: Unless they’ve already installed this. And they’re like, No, that’s mine, then

[00:44:29] Joe Daniel: Yeah, I can tell you that like this. This was one of my babies, but I would absolutely have embraced anyone who was like, I’ll take that for you. I’ll take it and run with it, and if you if you’re a head coach and you’re looking at this, just make it clear this is what I need to happen. OK, here’s what I need to happen. I need no practice pants to disappear this year. That’s that’s or anything to disappear this year. If that happens, you are successful to the person who’s taking it over and then back away and let them. And if they want to barcode, tell them to listen to this episode, whatever, if they want to do it a different way, great. I am sure there’s more than one way I don’t know it. But yeah, just make sure they know what the goal is and let them run.

[00:45:11] Daniel Chamberlain: So we brought up discount card, brought up some other stuff, some good time to jump on into the greatness that is football fundraising or any fundraising. What it maybe you’re not a football coach, you this for some reason it’s OK ideas and organizing with everything else man, I’m huge in the communication organizing. When it comes to this very first thing we have listed here is you’re creating a calendar for your year. You should have a master calendar. Anyway, let’s be honest, you need to know what’s going on if you’re not even that organized. And start working on yourself, I guess. Maybe you’re not so worried about, let someone else handle finances and work on yourself, but.

[00:45:44] Joe Daniel: And we talked about that in our off-season episode, right? We did so 11 seasons 10 episode 11, starting offseason. So we’ll link that as well because we’ve talked about kind of setting up the calendar for your off-season, which you if you haven’t done it already, to me, that’s what December is for. So we’re kind of coming out of that. But if you haven’t done it already, you’ve got to have that calendar kind of set up.

[00:46:08] Daniel Chamberlain: Yes, and it’s a good time to do it. You’ve got a few days till the beginning of the year. It’d be a good way to start the year. So the first thing the reason you want this calendar is because you want to ensure that and what you’ve talked about on here is, you know, you don’t want to be overlapping your fundraisers, you don’t want to be competing with yourself on where people’s money goes. You’re going to you’re already going be competing with off-season basketball. You’re going to be competing with the wrestling team, the track team powerlifting. And you may be the coach for some of those. And you have to figure out how you’re going to organize each fundraiser, you know, to be successful. If I, you know, if I’m making this calendar, I’m writing down when other people are doing theirs too, because I want as much as possible. I don’t want to compete with them, but you might as well set yourself up for success now and just start with, Hey, I want to be the only one doing a fundraiser at this time because parents already know all year long they’re going to be. If they can, they’re going to be donating to whatever program is out there, right? Whatever one’s asking right now. But the calendar is great, a great idea, and it’s a great way to see that visually, this is when my time is and I know I’m not competing with my neighbor.

[00:47:14] Joe Daniel: Yeah, and I think you want to as we go into the different types of fundraisers. One of the things that I think you want to do with the calendar is you want to be able to say you don’t want to ask the parents for time. So let’s say once a quarter. So once in the winter, once in the spring, once in the summer, once in the fall, we’ve got some sort of fund. Let’s just say we so we’ve got four major fundraisers and we’re probably not talking about, you know, we’re probably not talking a bake sale. We’ve got more than that going. I’ve done a car wash. It did fine. It’s not going to, you know, it’s not going to be the make-or-break deal. For the most part, although in high school, we had a pretty successful car wash and it was like an every year tradition. But anyway, point is this spread them out. Look at who you’re asking money from. Don’t have. First of all, make sure that like, like most of us, probably have a number of kids that are on track and football, right? It’s just to sports. If track is going to be asked, like you said, if track is going to be asking mom and dad for money in March, make sure you’re not asking mom and dad for money in March because it’s not going to. They’re going to. It’s not going to go well, it’s going to be a waste of time. So as you work out that calendar, I think what you’re looking at is not only can I do for big fundraisers, what can I do for big fundraisers that ask for money from essentially four different sources or in four different ways which we’ll get into? We want to spread them out and we don’t want to be asking for money, you know, constantly. And also, we don’t want to run for fundraisers because most of them, you’re going to need players to support those things. And it’s like, you’re going to have to chase players around to get this stuff done.

[00:48:58] Daniel Chamberlain: Yes. So for me is a huge tool that we’ve we’ve I don’t think we even use it enough here watching the fundraising this year. You know, I’ll talk about some ideas we use in just a little bit, but I don’t think we use social media to its full advantage. I mean, you have direct access to essentially your entire community if they have any interest whatsoever in your football program. They’re probably following your Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, whatever your school does, right? Schools have that now. Most of them are Facebook because they’re run by people who are 50. And we all know that Facebook is mainly people who are 50, so I don’t have one. I’m not too much of an age joke here, but the youth doesn’t use Facebook is what I’m really going to have. But some use it, man, use the stinking social media. That’s how you can talk directly. You’re right in their living room, you’re in the palm of their hand, literally. So use that also with the calendar, if you use it in conjunction with your annual calendar that we’ve already talked about like Joe said earlier in episode 11, then you can also planet where you have money ahead of time. You’ve done this fundraiser ahead of time to pay for the next big event. So if it’s a spring game or a spring camp or seven on seven now you’ve got your fundraiser in the month ahead of time, so you’re not strapped for cash trying to go into that or kids are having to pay their own way or whatever it is. Same thing in the summer, when it’s time to buy their the new workout clothes or whatever it is, you’ve done that fundraiser ahead of time. You have that money, so you can use a calendar here and help the income coincide with the event that you really want to focus it towards, which goes back to our first point of tell people what they’re fundraising for. Or why your fundraising? Hey, we need shirts and shorts for the weightlifting for the Summer Pride program, we want summer pride shirts. That’s what we’re raising money for.

[00:50:46] Joe Daniel: Yeah. And I think that if you, you know, let’s say that or you start, the first one that I put on the list is a lift-a-thon and I’ll just going to tell you that I’ve never been at as a coach. I’ve never run a lift-a-thon as a player. It was one of the biggest things to me. It was our annual I believe ours was in July or concluded in July. So we did all our testing for the end of the off-season to coincide with the lift-a-thon. And basically, we would go out and just show that for those who don’t have it, you know, I’ve never done a lift-a-thon We would go out and say, ask for a pledge of like a penny per pound and we would test bench squat and power clean. And that was a big deal for us because that as a player, because that was when you got your shirt. So if you were in the, you know, the 12000-pound club or whatever it was, you know, you got a 1000 club that you got your shirt. So part of the money was tied to those shirts. But what we would do is we would go, you know, and I lived in a suburb. And so I was able to do this and, you know, go around door to door and say, Hey, I’m. And I knew everybody in my neighborhood and I could say, Hey, we’re doing a lift-a-thon at the high school. And, you know, will you pledge a penny per pound? And a lot of people just were like, Can I just give you 20 bucks? Like, I don’t need to come back and tell me you lifted 1,246 pounds right now. Me write a check for $12.46. And so you give and you give them the option of that. Or you say or you can just make a donation to the program. But if you can do that when you go to do that and now you can probably do some of those pledges over social media, like you said. But when you go to do that, if you can say we are doing a lift-a-thon for new practice jerseys or to a lot of times, it’ll be like a lot, some of the successful ones I’ve seen are to fund our trip to Alabama to participate on a national 7 on 7 tournament, you know? OK. I don’t want to do that, but if you are doing that, great fundraiser for it. So being able to say specifically, this is what we want to do, this is how much we need. I’m not just like it makes things very real and somebody feels like they are not just donating to a cause, but essentially purchasing a part, purchasing a a chance to be a part of that. Yeah. And I think that that matters. And then they have some investment in program, more so than just, hey, I gave you only 20 bucks to golf alone.

[00:53:16] Daniel Chamberlain: Humans are very susceptible to the FOMO, the fear of missing out and and people who see a goal. And they just kind of assume you’re going to make that goal. They want to be a part of it. I mean, they really do. They’re going to want to they’re they really want to say, Hey, I’m in for $100 of that. $1500 they had to raise or whatever it is. So, yeah, you know, you were talking using social media together. It’s so easy nowadays just to if you went to a lift-a-thon or anything, and we’ll go through some more options here. But if you’re taking pledges or anything online, just you can create a Google form that Google Form will populate into an Excel sheet or a Google Sheet, I imagine. And you can get names, phone numbers, emails, their pledge. But the, almost said soldier, it’s going to happen a thousand times on this podcast, the player that they’re pledging that towards. And so then you’ve got away that accountability piece. You can go back and say, Hey, I’m just shoot your quick text. You pledge this. Here’s what they lifted. If you want to Venmo the money or PayPal or whatever you want again, whatever your school has. So that’s just a quick rundown of how to do that digitally. So you’re not going door to door,

[00:54:19] Joe Daniel: And the Google form will link directly up into a spreadsheet for you to keep track up.

[00:54:22] Daniel Chamberlain: Absolutely. And you don’t even have to do that. It’s one less thing you have to do. So something we use this year. Guys, if you look in the show notes, you’re going to see a lot of options. I highly doubt we’re going to go through all these, but I wanted to pick one that we did. We did what we called the flamingo flock. My wife brought it from work, actually. And that is essentially, I don’t know. There was an investment made for a whole bunch of items. Insert your mascot if you want, right? We did bears. She did flamingos at work, but at her office it worked like this. I want Joe’s office to be full flamingos when he shows up for work today, like an insane up. Maybe 300 flamingos are in this office. And so I pledge my $20 $30 and to get the flamingos out of your office, you have to pay an additional amount or you can pay them a lesser amount if you tell me in the next office they all go to. So you can pay a clean-out fee or you can pay a move it on someone else’s problem fee that’s less. And then it’s this chain reaction of hahaha, we all get to laugh at everybody who gets flop. It’s called getting flight. You can do it in people’s yards, offices, the gym floor, the football coaches office. If you do that, we’ll probably hate you, but you can really put these things anywhere. And you know, except for one up, we were the bears. So we. Did a better thing. Right, and so we just had bears made. And that’s what we wanted to go in and flock or. I don’t even know what we call a herd of bears. I’m sure there’s a word for it. I’m a biology scientist is letting me go. But anyway, and you take on and you fill up their area and then they have to either pay to get them removed or pay to move them on. So quickly adds up money because you’re in for, let’s say, you spend $100 on the items. It doesn’t matter. Or you could just do one giant inflatable thing and like, and I’ve got this monstrous thing in my office. Get it out here. 20 dollars make it go away. So it’s quick and easy. I mean, one thing you need is access to wherever you’re going to do it. Parents’ yards work really well and they can all pass it around, and it’s a great, great little trick.

[00:56:18] Joe Daniel: Yeah. And again, going back to where we’re getting the money from, it’s like, that’s something that could go around, you know, the office and not be a parent’s only thing. The lift-a-thon can be like neighbors and family members and things like that and not. And we will at times ask them, Hey, look, don’t ask your parents for this. This is not. Don’t worry, we’re going to hit your parents up for money. It’s not right now. One that I think is a lot of coaches miss out on is that there are a lot of restaurants who will do a deal with you. I know Chipotle does it. I think maybe Chick Fillet. It just depends on what’s in your area. Really, really simple. I know for Chipotle, it was super simple. I went on, went online, set the day up and was like, basically, if if for that day, they’ll give you a day and for that day from this time to this time. Anybody who goes into Chipotle is on what I’ve worked with, but anybody who goes into that restaurant and and orders food and says, Hey, this is for whatever high school you know this is for, you know, maybe high school football. At the time we’re I was where I’m at now. And there you get a percentage of that sale. And so this can be huge if you really so social media will be huge and getting the word out for this. Number one, they’re just getting lunch at Chipotle. You’re not. You are not asking them to do to give you money. Right, right. So that’s what I love about this and we’ve done really well with this, especially if you’re in an area where there’s like, you know, a Chipotle, like, it’s tough if you’re in a rural area and it’s a 30 minute drive. And I did that too, and we still did pretty good like everybody just loaded up and went out 30 minutes and they’re like, Man, we’re going to the city to get, you know, some some city food today or whatever, you know, some different. But they went and did it and they went, and you set it up, you try to. I would try to set it up in the summer where they can go after practice or something like that. And just all the kids, you know, all the kids you can drive just go out to practice and whatever. But that one did really well and you just go online and set that thing up. And again, all you have to do is get the word out and they go in, and that’s one where we could. First of all, you don’t have to worry about that being in a separate quarter. You know, that can you can do that any time, but you’re not asking parents for money, right? Just ask later from your own. Players are going to donate enough there just by going to eat Chipotle. Yep.

[00:58:54] Daniel Chamberlain: And we also know inventory and anything there, either, right? Your hands-off. I mean, it is the less you have to do, that’s a phone call and money. That’s pretty. It’s pretty simple.

[00:59:03] Joe Daniel: One thing you can do, and I don’t know that it is forbidden or whatever, but you can go sit, have a coach sitting at the restaurant and just ask people who are coming in there who don’t know about it. Yeah. Hey, can you mention that this is for what? What such and such? You know, we’re doing a fundraiser for whatever you just mentioned, our football program when you go up there. I know they probably have some sort of thing about that. But like, let’s be honest, are the people that are working, they’re really going to be like, that’s against the rules. No, probably not.

[00:59:30] Daniel Chamberlain: No. And I’m sure that not everyone is going to do that. You have to say it. You could probably just get a day designated right like this is our I think we’re just we’re going on whims here, but I’m sure they would give you a Saturday. Everything’s for you kind of thing.

[00:59:41] Joe Daniel: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

[00:59:42] Daniel Chamberlain: So so I’ve talked about Bixby on here before or something. I took out of a clinic from them this year and there, and they’re so like everything they do is so well done. But they did what they called their quarterback club. We had something in the ballpark of that this year. We call it the touchdown club, and it was almost like another group that just fundraised for the athletics, right? So touchdown club obviously was for football. It wasn’t. You don’t get touchdowns in baseball. So the touchdown club was our it’s just a committee that helped plan and executes a whole bunch of these fundraisers. And then I may have some of this wrong, but the one at Bigsby, it was like you. You paid a certain amount of money to be in the club and then you got the invites to the secret society stuff. Whether it was a golf tournament, which, you know, golf tournaments, something you listed on here is a completely different fundraiser, but maybe it’s a golf tournament only the quarterback club gets to come to or steak night at the local restaurant we’re going to have. The coaches get up and talk to the players, get up, talk and, you know, just have a story night or whatever. But you’re invited only if you’re part of this little society. So that’s a no. There’s something else to consider.

[01:00:48] Joe Daniel: And I think a lot of people have linked those types of things to special seating. Maybe you have reserved seating in the stands. Maybe you have your own, you know, special parking area, especially if parking is an issue at your school. Like at our school, there’s a parking lot next to the stadium and it’s not big enough. So most people at the park, like at the middle school, across the street and things like that for any kind of a big game. And so, you know, you can, you know, you can even do it in levels and say, Hey, for 50 bucks, you’re you’re in for 100 bucks. You get a seat for 200 bucks, you get parking for. I remember when I was in high school, we had what was called the, It was called the Dads Club at the time. I probably wouldn’t call it that now, but basically it was the dads who wanted to would pay the highest number in the highest number was it still wasn’t that high was, you know, like maybe three or four hundred dollars against, you know, twenty-five years ago, on Monday night, the head coach would watch the film with those guys. And if you think about it, it was probably 15 15 dads. That’s $4500 fundraiser

[01:02:03] Joe Daniel: Just spend 45 minutes watching the film and saying, Hey, and like you may be, you may be worried about doing this. I think that because, you know, the parents and all that kind of stuff set the expectations ahead of time of like, this is not the time to talk about your kid’s playing time. I’m not going to answer this question. I’m not going to do that. And then when you watch the film, don’t watch it like you’re watching it with the players, watch it like you’re watching it with the player’s mom or dad. And like, what a great play Johnny made right there. He’s really helping us, like, make everybody leave feeling good. So, yeah, anything like that where you can where you can kind of make, I think that anything and you mentioned the golf and anything that makes people want to feel special. And so if they’ve got a little something that, you know, a T-shirt that says, Touchdown Club, if there’s a little something you can throw in there that makes them feel like they’re doing a little more than everybody else. It’s a little competitive, but that’s cool. They’re going to be about it. Yeah.

[01:02:58] Daniel Chamberlain: Well, in the interest of time, and we could go on and on and talk and we talk fundraising raising forever. We set it forward. Shownotes, you’ll have these things listed out if you want to go down and read them.

[01:03:10] Joe Daniel: Yeah, just want to pop through real quick. Just one sentence when you know if you’ve done it.

[01:03:14] Daniel Chamberlain: Yeah, absolutely. So so the things we have listed here, and of course, this is an infinite list could be, but we’ve talked to lift-a-thon, discount card to something I’m sure everyone does. It makes enough money that we all keep doing it. You’ve mentioned car wash Joe.

[01:03:29] Joe Daniel: With a discount card real quick that one can be, if you haven’t done, it can be really, really good. You can do it yourself or there’s a lot of companies that will do it for you. Yeah, I think maybe it’s not as good as it once was because everybody does. And that’s that’s the issue you get into with the discount cards. Everybody does it. So if you’re going to do it, you want to be the program that does it, you know?

[01:03:49] Daniel Chamberlain: Yep, talk about partnering with a restaurant. Letters from afar. That’s not what I’ve heard of that one before, you want to run through that one.

[01:03:54] Joe Daniel: Letters from afar was a fundraiser that we did, and you could do with emails from afar now. But I think that letters are more effective. Letters from afar was a fundraiser that we did where we and again have purpose in it. But this is the idea of I don’t want to ask your parents need the kids to bring in 10 addresses, write 10 addresses from family members, family, friends who are not in the school district, who are in other states and other places. Your grandma lives five states away. Whatever you know, aunts, uncles, family, friends that lived somewhere else bring in five or 10 or whatever you can get. And we know how this goes. Some kids is going to be like pulling teeth to get one from somebody. You know, parents are going to pull out the Rolodex and bring in 50, but we were for the letter. This is a really cool fundraiser is the hardest part is getting those addresses. You make the letter, the letter as a form letter that the head coach can go through and, you know, sign it, sign every one of them or whatever to make it a little more personal. What the letter says , you know, such and such is a member of the put the kids name in there, print all the letters for him with his name in it. So he’s got 10 letters. I take those 10 letters. I do give them to him. He holds them up, put them in envelopes, puts, puts the address on them. OK, the letter says. We’re at such and such a program and we need to raise funds for this thing. We drop it in, put it in the mailbox. It goes away. Fundraiser over. Checks show up. Now you can. You can. You can 21ST Century this thing and say, here’s a donation link or whatever. But let’s be honest, grandma wants to write a check, right? OK, cool. Write a check. So you can write a check. You can donate to this PayPal link. You can do what? QR codes are big names. It was a cool. Yeah, you can, you can Venmo, you can, you know, whatever. But it was a cool fundraiser because some people would just like, send a check. Two months into the season and you’re like, Oh, here’s a general check, cool.

[01:05:53] Daniel Chamberlain: Some other ones we have local auction. I know that I’m pretty sure that when I was a player, I was auctioned off as like Grandma needs help for a day. She paid a hundred bucks or whatever, and I came out and motor grass and trim the hedges and helped her dust, whatever, whatever it was. Obviously, you got to be very careful auctioning off kids. But yeah, but you know, keep it in the community and keep it spirited. Well, and I think you’re okay there.

[01:06:19] Joe Daniel: So this was this was I’ll talk about this from real quick because it’s a really cool, a friend of mine set it up for another. So one of my friends is head basketball coach. OK, one of our mutual friends is like, Man, I want to. I want to. I want to help you out, want to do something. I want to, you know, again, he feels like he wants to be a part of something. So he says, I can do this. This thing, OK? He goes around to a bunch of businesses and local, you know, just local area stuff. He gets like, I mean, I’ve seen people do like hunts, like if you have private land or something like that services, you know, car detailing. So he got he got local businesses to donate their services or something that they could do or some sort of product to this auction. Then he did the auction, he did the auction at our bar that we were all that we all hang out at

[01:07:07] Daniel Chamberlain: Nice

[01:07:08] Joe Daniel: 45 minutes from the school. Not a single person related to the school is there. OK, the money goes back to the school, so we had to get it all set up. Mean, not me. I wasn’t involved, he had to get it all set up. But again, finding a way to do that now, obviously you can do. This is a big thing in the community, but there’s also ways to do it where the community isn’t even involved. Yeah. So this was just like it was like a social night where it was like, So again, this is a person who we’re all friends with. OK. He has. He has a lot of friends. We all hang out there and we all, you know, all friends of the local establishment. And it was just like went out and told everybody, Hey, this is going to be a night to support our friend and his basketball team. And they did this. And so this was just a way to get his friends to support to fundraise for the program.

[01:07:56] Daniel Chamberlain: Keep it out of the community.

[01:07:58] Joe Daniel: And again, don’t ask the same people for money over and over.

[01:08:01] Daniel Chamberlain: Right? And you know, you can also tie some of the we talk about not stacking on, but something like an auction like that. You can if you have a lift-a-thon and you have a live event, you can always have an auction going on on the side, right? So yes, they’ve donated their penny per pound or their dollar per pound, whatever they’re willing to give. But also they’re over, you know, doing a silent auction, the writing their name down and how much they want to pay for the thing. So I think some schools call that like a night of champions or a, you know, the community shows up and supports. And that way, maybe they didn’t pledge for a certain player. They’re just there to give it live. And then, you know, you have some small like that going on side. So, you know, some things do make sense to tack together. Yep. Grant is another one that you know you should always be researching what grants are out there. The JJ Watt Grant, that’s something that wined out did, and they were trying to get it all figured out and they were using another school local that had gotten approved for that grant and kind of seeing what it took. I mean, this is where those grants are sometimes going to take you more time, but you know, they’re going to get more money, right? A fundraiser, maybe you make, you know, three or four thousand dollars, and it’s more that kids time. But this summit, it’s your time. Maybe somebody in your administration office fills it out, but grants are, you know, it’s pretty easy money just to sit down and fill it out and once you get comfortable writing or filling out grants. The second and third one, a fourth one, are often a lot easier.

[01:09:21] Joe Daniel: Yeah, and you got to put it, you’ve got to hunt for these. And a lot of times there’ll be there’ll be specific like, you know, you know, maybe Riddell has a grant for jerseys and like specifically, they’re going to give you, you know, $4000 towards a jersey order or something like that. So but you got you got to hunt for them. But it is work in it. So you do have to look for him and you do have to put in the work to get them. Here’s what that means. Number one, not that many people are doing it. The money is out there. These companies want to feel like they are supporting local programs. They want to say that they are they maybe they might care about feeling like it, but they want to look like they’re supporting local programs, not specifically talking about really anything like that. Is it called Riddell, and not Reidel?

[01:10:02] Daniel Chamberlain: Doesn’t surprise me, Reidel, Riddell.

[01:10:06] Joe Daniel: So anyway. But but but the other thing is, you’re not asking anybody for money that you’re going to be asking for later. The email is a newsletter we skipped over that one. I’ve talked about that in the past, and I think it’s a really interesting idea that I would love to maybe help some people implement at some point. But that’s one where I’ve talked about just collect. It’s essentially what I do for my business, collecting email addresses and then sending out a weekly newsletter update, whatever on. Here’s what’s going on. They’re getting like the inside. Look at the program. Maybe, maybe you. Take a bunch of pictures that don’t go on Instagram, you video, take videos in the weight room and things like that that somebody can go and look and see and you just keep people updated. And then when you need something, you send out that email. We need $600. I think this is good for small stuff especially, but you can obviously announce all of your other fundraisers. Hey, we’re doing the auction, we’re doing the lift a thon, we’re doing the quote, we we’re doing the discount cards. But also, hey, if I want to do a go fund me, I can, just which we didn’t even put on here because I think that’s a really, you know, it’s a you’ve got to have another angle for it. So I want to do a go fund me as an example. I’d love to have an email list of, you know, 500 parents, aunts, uncles and where this goes from there in a second. But I send it out and say, Here’s the link. This is what we need. We need this much money because it’s on the go. Fund me how much money you need and you just link people to that. They could donate 10. They can donate 20. They can donate anonymously, which a lot of these other things they cannot do. So I think it’s a cool thing. Here’s what I think is cool about it. This is a long term fundraiser strategy. You got your seniors, you get their email address because they want to get all this stuff to write five years from now that seniors got disposable income because now they’ve graduated from college and they have a job, and maybe they’re willing to give 20 bucks back to the program. And that’s where I think if you do this year after year after year. So I would like to see this implemented above a I would like to see it implemented above a coach level because that coach is probably going to change and I want to make sure it exists year after year after year.

[01:12:10] Daniel Chamberlain: Yup, it’s good. Well man, I think we checked all the boxes we’re going to talk about tonight. You know,

[01:12:16] Joe Daniel: The golf tournament, the last one. I do want to mention that, oh, golf, somebody will pay you to clean up. I didn’t mean the golf tournament. Oh, that’s what we. So you can do golf tournaments, obviously, but we have found lots and lots of different things. Local events, not just golf tournaments, but the big one when I was in high school was some PGA tournament was at a country club in Atlanta and we would send, you know, 60 high school football players to. I mean, we were in charge of like distributing beer, which is a bad idea golf tournament. Let me tell you how that turns out, but we did other stuff like, you know, cleaning up trash, doing all that sort of stuff. And you there are events that will let you clean up, essentially. And because you have an army of kids who can come down and clean up after, you know, a fair after, you know, churches have, you know, when a church has a big festival right at the end of that big festival and stuff got to get cleaned up. Yep, and that’s a way, you know, that’s and get it and you just get a flat fee. 500 bucks. All right. 500 bucks. I’m going to send 20 kids down there on Saturday afternoon. They’re going to work from noon to eight and they’re at your check.

[01:13:26] Daniel Chamberlain: Nice. So we covered our why covered the importance of fundraising. Unfortunately, we all don’t all want to do it, but there’s stuff that we need. We talked about equipment inventory, the barcode method or whatever you want to implement just the importance of inventory, everything, stop hemorrhaging money. And then we covered some ideas there at the end and how to organize that. And I think that’s a lot of really good ideas there. So like, you could take those and pick four and put them on a quarterly schedule and rock and roll. So I think we hammered it all at them

[01:13:59] Joe Daniel: And keep doing them. Do when you find one, if you do it year after year after year, you should be working to get better at it each year. I think that one of the things that we see that I see as a mistake is when you do a, I’ll take the discount cards as an example. When you do the discount cards with a company one year and then the next year, you decide to make your own. The next year you use a different company. I would rather, first of all, rather have somebody else do it all. But I just want I want to be able to get my kids to understand how to do this, and I won’t understand how to organize my kids to go out and do this. And as much as possible, find fundraisers where you don’t have to do the work because you got to. You had enough stuff going on.

[01:14:39] Daniel Chamberlain: Well, man, I think it’s time to pay the bills and close it out.

[01:14:42] Joe Daniel: Yep. So JDFB Coaching Systems, we got five complete coaching systems that you can get access to at join.joedanielfootball.com along with the coaching systems and the whole coach simple play, fast win. One of the things you’ll get when soon as you sign up for $1, you get access to everything. So one of the things that you’ll see immediately when you get in there, you can go to the resources section and there’s my program manual. When I was from when I was the head coach a few years ago, and in that program manual, you will see my calendar, all of my fundraisers that I and I understand that I did not get to implement all of these, but this was what got me hired was partly coming in there with this plan and setting it down. So all of you guys who are going to be doing interviews, having a plan like this, you’re going to separate yourself. So take a look at that program. So you’ve got to if you’ve got an interview or you’re planning on doing some interviews, I would take a look at that program manual. I can’t take credit for it other than putting the finishing touches on it. Rick Stewart is the guy who kind of gave me all these ideas, but you can see what it looks like and then you can check out Rick stuff at AllAcessCoaching.net, I think. Just look for Rick Stewart and check it out. But if you go to join.joedanielfootball.com, you can see all of that. And of course, we talk about it all the time in our chalk talks and you can check chalk talk archive for that. If this is your first time listening to the football coaching podcast, make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any future episodes. We are on Stitcher, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and on our website at JoeDanielFootball.com, where you can listen all the episodes as well. And if you listen for a while, please go and leave a review because it is a huge help to getting the word out. If you’re on your podcast app on your iPhone, then you can just scroll down to the bottom, click, write a review and leave a review. It’s greatly, greatly, greatly appreciated. I am Joe Daniel and I am @footballinfo on Twitter.

[01:16:25] Daniel Chamberlain: I am Coach Chamberlain. I’m @CoachChamboOK, and the podcast is @theFBCP.

[01:16:35] Joe Daniel: Got it! Nailed it @theFBCP. We actually have some things happening there, so we’re getting it now and moving forward with that. So that’s can be it for this episode of The Football Coaching Podcast. Remember Coach Simple, Play Fast Win.

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