Fundraising

You don't need a six-week runway, a fundraising consultant, or a printed flyer to launch a team fundraiser. You need about three hours of focused work and a roster of athletes willing to send a few text messages. Here's how teams that hit their goals actually do it.

Saturday morning (one hour). Set the campaign up. Open Team Scout. Click Fundraising, then Create Campaign. Name it something specific — “2026 Helmet Replacement Drive” outperforms “Eagles Fundraiser” by a wide margin. Set a real goal. Most teams use a per-athlete number ($300 to $500 per kid is the common range) multiplied by the roster size. Write two short paragraphs: what the money is for and who your team is. Upload one photo of practice. Create the draft, give it one read-through on the campaign page, and hit Publish.

Saturday afternoon (one hour). Write the team in. Send your roster the share-link instructions. The Team Scout app already has copy-paste-ready text and DM templates — point your athletes at them so nobody has to write anything from scratch. Tell each player to identify five family members they'll personally text on Sunday. Five contacts, not fifty. The goal is the first wave of donations from people who know them.

Sunday morning. The first wave goes out. Each athlete sends five personal texts. Family first. Donations start landing on Sunday afternoon. The campaign page shows momentum publicly — donor names, dollar amounts, a progress bar — and that momentum is what drives the second wave.

Sunday afternoon. Stories and posts. After the first wave of family gifts has come in, athletes post one Instagram Story or TikTok with a link in their bio. The story is something like “[TEAM] fundraiser — link in bio — every dollar goes to the team.” That's it. They don't need to be content creators.

Monday at practice. Recognize the early movers. At Monday practice, name the athletes who already brought in donations. Public recognition early in the campaign sets the tone. The kids who haven't started yet will start by Tuesday.

That's the launch. The campaign runs for two to four weeks from there, with two scheduled push days (mid-campaign and final 24 hours), and the team usually hits its goal.

The teams that don't hit their goal almost always made the same mistake: they treated it like a project that required perfection before launching. They waited for the perfect cover photo, the perfect goal number, the perfect copy. The teams that hit their goal launched something imperfect on a Saturday and improved it Tuesday.

The hardest part of a personal fundraiser isn't the asking. It's deciding who to ask. Athletes overthink this and end up posting one mass story to Instagram, getting two donations, and concluding fundraising is broken.

The 5-30-50 framework solves the “who” question. Every athlete on a Team Scout campaign should plan to personally reach 5 + 30 + 50 = 85 people during the campaign — across three concentric rings.

Ring 1: The Inner 5. These are the five people who would give to almost anything you asked them to. Your closest grandparent, a generous aunt or uncle, your godparents, your parents' best friends. You text these five within the first 24 hours of the campaign launch. They give first — usually meaningful amounts — and they create the social proof that everyone else sees on the campaign page.

Ring 2: The Familiar 30. Family-by-association, neighbors who know you by name, your previous coaches, your teachers, your youth-group leaders, your parents' close friends, the parents of your closest friends. These are people who recognize you and have a reason to wish you well. You reach them in the first week — through DMs, texts, and personal messages. Not all of them give, but most are willing to share or send a smaller amount.

Ring 3: The Wider 50. Your followers on social media, your parents' extended network, your dad's coworkers, your mom's book club, the alumni of your team, the small businesses your family frequents. You reach them mainly through posts, stories, and shares — not personal outreach. The conversion rate is lower, but the reach is wider.

Here's why the framework works: most athletes default to Ring 3 only. They post one story, expect strangers to give, and get demoralized when nobody does. The truth is that Rings 1 and 2 fund 70%–85% of every successful campaign. Ring 3 is the cherry on top.

If every athlete on a 30-player roster reaches 85 people, that's 2,550 personal touches across the campaign. Even a 10% conversion rate produces 255 donors. At an average gift of $40, that's $10,200 raised — without a single candy bar.

Practical tip: open a notes app, list out who's in your 5, your 30, and your 50, before you write the first message. Most athletes who do this hit their personal goal. Most who skip it don't.

The reason asking for money online feels awkward is usually that the athlete is trying to disguise the ask. They post a picture of a sunset and a vague caption hoping people figure it out and give. Nobody figures it out. Nobody gives.

The fix is to be more direct, not less. Direct, specific asks convert better and feel less awkward to send than vague ones — partly because the receiver knows immediately what's being asked, and partly because the asker isn't pretending to do something other than what they're doing.

Here's the format that works:

1. Lead with the team and the cause, not yourself. “[TEAM_NAME] is fundraising for [SPECIFIC_THING]” lands better than “I'm fundraising.” You're not asking for yourself — you're representing your team. Posting from that frame is less awkward and more honest, because it's true.

2. Be specific about what the money buys. “$15,000 for new helmets and a tournament in Dallas” outperforms “$15,000 for the team” by a wide margin. People give to specific things. They don't give to general teams.

3. Make the ask small and bounded. “My personal goal is $300” beats “any amount helps” because it gives the donor a frame. Most people give somewhere between $25 and $100. Telling them your goal helps them decide where to land.

4. Tell people 100% goes to the team. This is what makes Team Scout campaigns convert: donors trust where their money is going. Saying “no platform fee — 100% goes to the team” removes the most common objection people don't say out loud.

5. End with a low-pressure exit. “If not, no problem — a share would mean a lot.” Lets people decline without ghosting you, and explicitly invites the second-best action (sharing). Many of the people who don't give will share, and shares produce more donations.

A post that uses all five elements feels less like begging and more like inviting. That's because that's what it actually is — you're inviting people who care about you to participate in something specific your team is doing. The awkwardness goes away when the ask matches the reality.

One more thing: do not apologize for asking. “Sorry to bother you” or “I hate doing this” are signals that you think the ask is shameful, and donors pick that up. Asking your community to support your team is not shameful. It's how teams have always worked. Just ask.

We started Team Scout because the math wasn't working for the teams we cared about. A homeschool football team in Texas raised $14,000 on a major fundraising platform and saw $11,200 land in its account — the platform took $2,800 for “running the campaign.” A private-school cheer squad raised $9,500 and got $7,100. Same story.

We didn't think “running the campaign” should cost teams thousands of dollars. So when we built Team Scout, we made a different decision: no percentage of a donation, ever. No setup cost. No monthly. No tier you have to upgrade to. Two things come out of a gift. The first is the standard card-processing fee — about 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction — which is what Visa, Mastercard, and the banks charge to move money, and which is identical on every fundraising platform because it isn't the platform's fee. The second is 0.4%, which Team Scout holds back to pay your Stripe account's own bills — volume fees, the monthly account fee, a fee for each payout, and $1.50 each time a family links a bank account — so those arrive already paid. If they ever come to more than was held back, only the difference is taken from a later payout. At checkout a donor can choose to cover both. When they do, your team receives the full gift; when they decline, your organization covers it.

So how do we stay in business?

When a donor gives, they see a checkout screen with an optional tip line to Team Scout. The default suggestion is a modest 12%. They can pick 10% or 15%, type in any amount, or tap “no thanks” and pay zero. The tip is always optional and never affects the gift to your team.

That tip is what funds Team Scout. Servers, support, the people building the product, payment infrastructure, the security audits, the platform staying online at 2 a.m. when somebody is finishing a fundraiser before bed.

We picked this model for two reasons:

It's honest. Donors can see exactly how the platform stays alive. There's no quiet 25% bite hidden in the fine print. People know what they're paying and they choose to pay it. That alignment matters.

It pushes us to deliver. Tips are voluntary, which means the platform has to be good enough that donors want to support it. If we ever stop earning that — if we get clunky, slow, or unhelpful — the tips dry up. That's the right kind of accountability for us to live with.

A few other companies use this model — Givebutter pioneered it, Cheddar Up does it, ChangeUp does it. None of them is a football platform. We're building this specifically for the homeschool, private-school, and club football world we know, where the teams are small enough that every dollar matters and big enough that 25% to the platform is a real loss.

So that's the whole story. Donors see a tip jar. They tip what feels right. Teams keep their money. We stay free. It's not complicated, and we like it that way.

A silent auction on Team Scout runs online. You add the items, set when bidding opens and closes, and share one link. Supporters bid from their phone, and when bidding ends each winner's saved card is charged and the money goes to your organization through Stripe.

Before you start

Bidding needs a connected Stripe account, because winners are charged automatically. If your organization has not connected Stripe yet, do that first from the Connect Stripe step on your Hub checklist. You can build the auction and add items before then; you just can't publish it.

Set up the auction

1. In the Hub, open Donations & Fundraising, then Auctions, and choose New auction.
2. Give it a name, a short description and a cover photo, and choose when bidding opens and closes. Times are in your organization's time zone. Add pickup instructions once for the whole auction; an item can have its own.
3. Winners pay a 5 percent processing and platform fee on top of their winning bids, so your organization receives every winning bid in full. Bidders see this before they bid.

Add items

Each item has a title, a description, photos, a starting bid and a bid increment. You can also set a buy now price, a close time of its own, the name of the donor or sponsor who gave it, and its own pickup note. Drag photos to put them in order; the first one is the cover. Bids are whole dollars, and the smallest increment is one dollar.

Have a list already? Choose Import from CSV and upload a file with the columns title, description, starting bid and increment. Rows with a problem are listed by line so you can fix them and import again. Duplicate an item to start a similar one, or archive an item to take it out of the auction.

Publish and share

When the auction has at least one item and Stripe is connected, choose Publish. Copy the public link to share it anywhere, or choose Post it to the feed to put it in front of your members. Anyone can browse the items without signing in. To bid, a supporter signs in with their phone number and saves a card once.

While bidding is open

• A bidder can enter a max bid. Team Scout bids for them, one increment at a time, up to that amount, and never shows their max to anyone.
• A bid in the last five minutes adds five minutes to that item's close, up to thirty minutes in all, so nobody wins by bidding in the final second.
• Bidders get a notification when they are outbid, when an item they bid on is closing soon, and when they win.
• The live board in the Hub shows each item's current bid, how many bids it has, who is leading, and how much time is left. It refreshes on its own every 15 seconds.

When items close

Each item closes at its own time, and the highest bidder wins. When bidding ends, each winner's saved card is charged once for everything they won. If a charge does not go through, the winner gets a pay link and has 48 hours to pay. If the time runs out, you can offer the item to the next highest bidder from the Winners tab.

The Winners tab lists every item with its winner, the final amount, and whether it is paid, failed, or waiting on a pay link. You can resend a pay link, record a check or cash payment by hand, and download the list as a CSV. The totals show what was raised, what your organization received, and the fees winners paid on top.