Spend enough time around school fundraising and you very quickly realise that two P&Cs can be putting in just as much effort, with equally committed volunteers, and still end up with completely different fundraising results because the communities they are working within are not the same.

One school might run an event and raise $500, while another runs something that looks fairly similar and raises $10,000, and on paper it can be tempting to assume that one was simply more successful than the other.

But fundraising does not happen on a level playing field.

The community you fundraise in matters

Some school communities have parents with strong connections to local businesses, major employers, philanthropists or organisations that are willing and able to make significant donations, and they may also have access to venues, prizes, professional services or sponsorship at little or no cost.

Other schools simply do not have those same networks available to them, and their fundraising might come almost entirely from sausage sizzles, discos, raffles, cake stalls and asking families to contribute a few dollars at a time.

That does not mean one P&C is better at fundraising than another. It means they are fundraising in very different environments, with different resources, different opportunities and different levels of financial capacity within their communities.

Community wealth is only one part of the picture, because a school might have families with the ability to support fundraising financially but very few people with the time or capacity to organise events, while another school might have a really committed group of volunteers but families who simply cannot afford to keep spending money on fundraiser after fundraiser.

Even our ideas about what schools should sell can come from a particular lens

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day stalls are a good example of this.

We often see conversations about whether schools should sell locally made products, sustainable gifts, handmade items or products sourced from particular retailers, and those conversations are useful because most of us would love to support local businesses and offer beautiful, high-quality products where we can.

But sometimes a P&C has 300 children who need to be able to buy a gift for $5, and the volunteers organising that stall have to find something children will actually want to buy, at a price families can afford, while still making enough money for the fundraiser to be worthwhile.

That might mean buying from a local maker. It might mean using a wholesale supplier. It might mean Kmart, Amazon, Temu or somewhere else entirely.

There can be a tendency to judge those decisions through a fairly privileged lens that assumes every school has the same purchasing power, supplier access and ability to absorb higher costs, when in reality they simply do not.

Affordability matters too.

$200 can be a brilliant fundraiser

We also need to be careful about the way we talk about fundraising totals, because a fundraiser that makes $200 with almost no work might actually be a huge success for a particular school.

Maybe it paid for new readers, helped cover the cost of an excursion, funded a student activity, or simply gave the P&C a way to raise some money without asking already exhausted volunteers to give up another weekend.

At the same time, another P&C might be trying to raise $50,000 for a playground, basketball court or major infrastructure project, and for that group a series of $200 fundraisers is simply not going to get them where they need to go.

Neither group is doing it wrong. They just have different goals, and that means they need different fundraising strategies.

Sometimes the better questions are not simply, “How much did you raise?” but also: how much work did it require, did your community enjoy it, could you realistically do it again, and did it move you closer to what your school actually needs?

This is why sharing ideas matters — without judgement

One of the things we want No More Sausages and the P&C Collective to be is a place where lots of different ideas can sit alongside each other without anyone feeling that there is one right answer.

Someone might share a fundraiser that made their school $15,000, and that might work brilliantly for another hundred schools while being completely unsuitable for another hundred.

Someone else might share a simple fundraiser that made $350 with almost no volunteer effort, and for a stretched P&C with four active volunteers that might be exactly the idea they needed.

The value is not in finding the single best fundraiser, because there really isn't one. The value is in having enough ideas circulating that communities can pick up the ones that suit their people, their capacity, their resources and their goals.

It also means allowing people to say, “This worked for us,” without suggesting everyone else should copy it, and allowing someone else to say, “That wouldn’t work in our community,” without dismissing the idea or the people who shared it.

We are all trying to do the same thing

Behind almost every school fundraiser is a group of volunteers who are simply trying to make something better for kids.

They might be raising $300 or $30,000. They might have corporate sponsors or a trestle table and a borrowed barbecue. They might have twenty regular volunteers or three committee members doing almost everything.

Those differences matter, and fundraising already asks enough of volunteers without adding another layer where people feel their school, their budget or their efforts somehow do not measure up.

So perhaps the best thing we can keep doing is what we already see so often in this community: sharing generously, asking questions, offering ideas, being upfront about what worked and what absolutely did not, and showing a bit of kindness towards the very different fundraising realities happening in different schools.

Share the fundraiser that made a fortune. Share the tiny one that required almost no work. Share the local supplier. Share the cheap option. Share the thing you would absolutely do again and the thing you would never touch with a ten-foot pole.

Then let each community decide what belongs in their boat.

Because we might all be in the same fundraising storm, but our boats are very different, and every group of volunteers trying to make their little corner of the world better deserves to be celebrated. So go you.