Reward Students with Experiences Instead of Trinkets

Summary:

• Rewarding students with experiences rather than cheap physical items can create lasting memories and encourage community involvement.
• Group rewards, such as pizza parties or ice cream socials, promote student bonding and are ideal for team-based fundraising events like Penny Wars or Serve-A-Thons.
• Individual rewards, such as allowing a student to be “principal for a day,” provide personal recognition and can foster a sense of achievement and responsibility.
• Thoughtfully chosen rewards can inspire broader participation in school fundraisers, benefiting the entire school community.

Rewards for students who participate in your school fundraisers are important. They help commemorate each student’s contribution and encourage them to form positive associations with meaningful community involvement.

But school groups often work with limited resources to plan and execute successful fundraisers, which doesn’t leave much room in the budget for rewards. As a result, many students end up with cheap plastic trinkets as a thank-you for their involvement.

Fortunately, there’s a better way. Keep reading to find out why providing experiences for your students can be a better way to reward them—and often, a more cost-effective one as well.

Kids Keep Memories—Not Junk

Conventional wisdom suggests that physical items make better rewards than experiences because they’ll last longer. But that isn’t always true.

Just because an item is tangible, that doesn’t mean the person who receives it will treasure it forever. People declutter their lives and living spaces all the time. If they receive an item that has no practical value, they’re likely to get rid of it at their first opportunity.

Squishy balls and plastic yo-yos might seem like affordable gifts, but most of the time, they’re just future landfill waste. Conversely, the right experiences can stick around in peoples’ minds for years—sometimes even forever.

What Experiences Make the Best Rewards?

So if cheap toys are out as rewards for students, what kinds of experiences should you provide instead? This depends on a few factors, including your school’s budget and the interests of your student population. 

But you should also think about whether you’re planning to reward a group of students for their participation in an event or a single student. You’ll probably want to take different approaches depending on the type of fundraiser you’re holding.

Group Rewards

The main benefit of group rewards is that they promote student bonding. Offer the right group reward for participating in an activity and you do more than just show your appreciation to a group of students—you could also help them create and strengthen friendships that will last long into the future.

When to Offer Them

Group rewards are best for fundraisers where students work together in teams. This could apply to athletic events where different teams face off against each other, or school-wide events where students are grouped by grades or classrooms.

Here are a few examples:

• Penny Wars
• Volleyball Serve-A-Thons
• Baseball-Hit-A-Thon

What to Offer

There are lots of different experiences you can offer to groups of students, but the key is to do something memorable that won’t break the bank.

To achieve this, remember that an experience doesn’t have to be expensive or elaborate to be meaningful. In fact, students often prefer fairly simple and unstructured events where they’re free to socialize with each other.

So no, you don’t need to take an entire grade eight class to Paris because they won a Serve-A-Thon. Instead, you might try some of the following:

• A pizza party
• An ice cream social
• A movie party
• Extra recess

Individual Rewards

Sometimes, it’s nice to reward a specific student who has raised a significant amount of money on their own, or made some other notable contribution to the school community.

This is a great way to instill a sense of achievement in a young person and show them that their actions make a difference—lessons that can help set them up for a lifetime of success.

When to Offer Them

Rewards for individual students are best in situations where students are engaging in healthy competition on a one-on-one basis, or where they’re competing with themselves to break a personal record.

Some examples include:

• School Fun Runs
• Chess-A-Thons
• Math-A-Thons

Note that many individual competitions can also be organized around group rewards—for example, you might reward the grade or class that solves the most math problems collectively during a Math-A-Thon, instead of an individual student. But it depends on what you want to achieve!

What to Offer

Obviously, it wouldn’t be practical—or healthy—to throw a pizza party or ice cream social for a single student. But there are other experiences you can give them that don’t cost much and will still mean the world to them.

One great idea is to reward an individual student by finding a job that an adult is doing and letting them do it for a set time period instead. For example, you might consider:

• Making them a hall monitor or principal for a day
• Announcing their name over the PA
• Letting them do the announcements

These things cost nothing, but they’ll help a young person feel accomplished and important while cultivating their work ethic and sense of responsibility. And they’re public—so other students get to see the reward and recognition too! This can inspire more people to participate in future fundraising events.

Learn More: Anatomy of a Successful School Fundraiser

Create Fundraisers that Reward Your Whole School Community

Offering the right rewards and incentives to students does more than just benefit them—it helps get your whole student body interested in supporting projects that benefit them in the long run.

We designed FutureFund to help you run a whole variety of different fundraisers from start to finish. Get started today for free today so that you can reward your school community in more ways than one.