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How To…
A Step-by-Step Guide to the Safety Home Address Fundraiser!
Safety Home Address has designed and provided high quality reflective addressing products since
the early 1990’s. With our focus on proper addressing for the customer and promotion of the concept of driveway entrance addressing supporting 911 first responders, our products are welcomed by many fire
districts and are being put to use in communities all across America.
Now we’ve compiled a group of concept products for fundraiser groups. This fundraiser is a valuable community
service as well as an easy way for your group to meet its financial goals. Earning potential is much greater with items that are actually needed by nearly every resident in your county!
Typical fundraisers offer non essential items. They have no lasting purpose and bring no motivational drive to be involved in the same old, same old. Kids as well as
adults want to feel good about what they’re doing. It’s hard to believe in or stand behind a candy bar or pizza! It all becomes a lot of work real fast. So after the
candy bars, pizzas, or subs have all been eaten, high quality reflective addressing from Safety Home Address continue to serve each happy customer and emergency responders for years to come.
Addressing products also have a much higher profit per item. Imagine… you would have to sell 16 candy bars, that’s 16 sales, to make the same profit of one address
panel sale. Well stop imagining! Believe it! For every one involved this is a real winner!
Panels sell for $20, you make $8 profit!
GuidePosts sell for $30, you make $10 profit!
This guide will help you through every aspect of working with Safety Home Address to meet your fundraiser
project goals. From concept to cash, you’ll be amazed at how easy it really is to raise those needed funds with our tools and products! They really will make LIFE easier!
The 5 fundraiser products we currently supply are… Standard Vertical, Deluxe Horizontal, Deluxe Vertical,
GuidePost, and the Single-Flag. Details of each of these products can be found by clicking on them to the left.
Decisions, Decisions
Ok, you’ve seen some of the tools and utilities we’ve provided to make the Safety Home Address fundraiser easier. Like many others, you’ve now come to
the conclusion that this SHA fundraiser is the best way to raise those funds for your group and you’re wondering where to begin!
Well, you’ll need to start with a Group ID number. This number registers you in our system as a fundraiser
group and allows us to track your products and orders as you make those sales! Group ID numbers are given out by Distributors. If you need to know who the Distributor in your area is, just call us toll
free at 1-800-391-7453 and we will connect you with our nearest representative.
After getting a Group ID number you must decide how you are going to go about getting sales! There are many
very effective methods and you may find success in incorporating more than one of them. Here, we’ve listed just a few.
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Door to Door – This is the most traditional method used since the dawn of
selling. Just send your team home with the product order sheets, receipts, in a presentation folder with a pen. A basic sales kit! They will go door-to-door in their spare time making sales here and
there at random. Don’t forget family and friends!
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Neighborhood Drive – This can be more effective involving community
safety awareness with endorsements from local business or news release from local papers and backing from fire districts. You’ll find lots of people want to get on board with something that’s
worthwhile. As an organized approach your group enters a neighborhood and systematically covers each area home to home in an effort to cover the entire neighborhood in reflective addressing. If
there’s a neighborhood council or organization, you may have the perfect opportunity to make a large number of sales in short amount of time. Sometimes an area specific type of addressing product
will be preferred or endorsed and officials might make an order for the entire neighborhood!
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The Tabletop Display – Set up a table somewhere. Anywhere with a high
amount of foot traffic. Outside a grocery store, in your church lobby or at a school event! There are so many great places to get exposure to large numbers of people. Safety Home Address offers a
number of tabletop displays and samples for this purpose.
Which ever sales method you choose, you’ll soon be receiving orders and you’ll need to know how to use the
great tools we’ve provided for you! As part of your $20 group registration fee, you’ll receive a CD for your computer with many tools to use in your fundraising project and the promotional SHA
Fundraiser video. Show the video to you entire group. It will motivate and give them a good understanding of the fundraising program.
Preparing the Props
In a typical sale, the customer will need to be presented with the products. To make LIFE easier, Safety Home Address has created several presentation
tools.
The main presentation tools are the Product Sheets. The Panel Product Sheet shows three panel product choices… Standard Vertical, Deluxe Horizontal, and Deluxe
Vertical panels. The GuidePost Product Sheet shows off two different items, the post style vertical address marker and the Single-Flag horizontal panel.
Click here
to take a better look at these sheets. Typically, they would be printed in color on the front and back of a sheet of paper or displayed in a folder for your sellers to take with them while they make
their sales. The sheets display the colors and specifications for each item as well as the typical way they should be used.
When you use the Safety Home Address Product Sheets you can customize them with your fundraiser groups name as the heading.
To do this, first open one of the sheets. If you are having trouble opening them, you may have to install Adobe Acrobat Reader which is also located on the CD. Once
open, you will see a line at the top that reads, “Enter Your Group Name Here!” This is where you will enter the name of your Fundraising Group. Just select this text and type in your Group name! Now
you may print it out or save it to your computer with your group’s name in it for future printing. To save it, just open the “File” menu at the top and select “Save As…” It will ask you where to place
the new sheet and what to name it.
It’s a good idea to make a folder somewhere for these sheets as there are several that you will edit throughout the fundraising process and you may want to return to
them later.
For more advanced sales techniques, there are several display items that SHA provides. They are all created here at Safety Home Address with the highest regard to
quality and colors. There are large and small display boards as well as full samples of each product. Each item may be customized to suite your needs and we are even able to make entirely new display
items based on your input!
The next items you will need to configure are the Panel and GuidePost Order Sheets. These sheets are handy forms for recording orders while on the move.
Or
Click here for detailed instructions on filling this form out for each order. Again, you will need to open the file, change the text that says, “Enter You Group
Name Here!” replace with your group’s name, and save the file somewhere for your future use.
You can record orders for any of the products on both sheets, but this arrangement facilitates the ability to pick and choose your product sets. You may only wish to
sell the GuidePost and Single-Flag products and in that case you could easily print the GuidePost Order Sheet all by itself. For more ordering slots, you can print the GuidePost Order Sheet on the back
of the Panel Order Sheet or any other combination you desire! One thing we suggest, though. Laminate your Product Sheets! You’ll get a lot more life out of them and they’ll look better as well.
Finally, you need to prepare the receipts. Customizing this file happens in the same manner as the others, except there are 2 fields to edit. The field titled, “Enter
Your Group Name Here!” will need to be changed to your group’s name of course, but there is also a field titled, “Group Phone Number” that will need to be replaced by your group’s contact phone number.
You’ll notice that when you change one of the fields, the information is changed on the rest of the receipts at the same time. Again, after changing these items for your customized use, save the file
somewhere where you can get at them later to make more. Click here for details on how to fill out a receipt.
After customizing your receipts, you’ll want to cut them apart for distribution later. A single staple in the middle of the left edge is best.
Now your sellers are ready to go out and collect those orders. When the sellers go out with their new tools, it's a good idea for them to have something like a
clip-board to write on. They should also at this point have customized Product Sheets, Order Sheets, Receipts, a folder to hold them in, and something to write with.
The Sales
Next, you’ll need to send out your sellers. You should already have decided on the methods for sales and created the tools for the sales and now you’re only collecting
those sales. If your sellers are filling Order Sheets, it’s a great idea to start recording the orders on those sheets as you get them. It will make your job even easier.
The SHA fundraiser has a few minimums in sales that you will want to meet before you place your order.
Sales of at least 50 panel type products should be made. If you don't meet this minimum, you will be charged an additional 50¢ for each panel if you still want to
place the order. Also, if you sell any GuidePosts, you’ll need to sell at least 25 of them in order to avoid a $2 per post charge.
If you find that you’re only a few items away from making your minimums, you can enter extra items by making up imaginary addresses, making some for your organization,
entering some for your top sellers, or just enter “XXX” into the address of the item.
Just meeting the minimums isn’t likely to meet your fundraiser goal anyway. The minimums would net your fundraiser $400 profit for 50 panels and $250 for 25
GuidePosts. Usually fundraiser goals are over $thousands.
Ordering
One of the most useful tools to your fundraiser will be the SHA Workshop. This program is found on the fundraiser tools CD and is designed
specifically for the SHA fundraiser. Use it to enter your orders and it will handle the rest!
Here’s just a few of the features of this program:
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Keep track of accrued profit.
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Display the top 3 seller’s and their sales amounts.
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Total the cost for the SHA products sold.
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Keep track of the quantities of different numbers required to fill your orders.
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Place your order online.
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Create organized Build Sheets to make order assembly a cinch.
After entering your orders, use the Finalize feature to print Build Sheets and send off your order. Build
Sheets are used later to assemble your orders once you receive your products. You’ll need to send in payment for the product at this time and your order will be processed as soon as we receive it. The
SHA Workshop order confirmation page will tell you how much to make the check out for and where to send it. Remember to keep the original Order Sheets for delivery later. Click
here for more details.
Assembly
After we receive your payment, we will process your order and ship it out to you. You’ll receive all the
panels and numbers needed to fill your orders with some extra numbers thrown in just-in-case. We even pay the shipping!
Get the team together to assemble the orders. The Build Sheets that where created with the SHA Workshop will smooth this process. The orders on the Build Sheets are
grouped by the seller’s initials. Just cut the Build Sheets up into the different initials and hand them out to your assemblers. This will keep all of the products assembled together so that they may
be returned to their original seller for delivery.
Delivery
After assembly of the orders, distribute the finished orders back to the sellers for delivery along with the original customer address and phone
number. It’s best if the original sellers return to their customers with the products. You may want to call the customers to a specified place and time for pick-up of their items if your group is not
further involved in installation of the address products.
Remember, you have an excellent opportunity to earn extra money for your fundraiser group in installation. Some people will like to have their new
address marker installed for them and you may charge for this service! We suggest $2 to $5 for an installation fee, but that part is up to you.
That’s ALL
Yep! That’s it! It takes about 3 to 7 weeks from beginning to end of this process to meet or surpass your fundraising goals. That’s a couple days for
setup, 1 - 3 weeks of gathering sales, 1 week for SHA to process your order, 3 - 10 days to receive the order, and a couple more to assemble and deliver those products to the customers.
Click on the Calculator near the top-right and use the handy profit/goal/time estimation calculators to see what it will take for your group to meet your goals! |
