The Quizbowl Resource Center

So pretty much last year, which also happens to be our first, we had strong funding from our principal. This year, however, he has essentially given us 0 due to "budget issues". Does anyone have any suggestions to where we might be able to secure funding? I'm sure other teams have had this probelm before and any help and/or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: We live in Iowa if that matters.

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Our school normally gives us enough finding, but I know that a lot of clubs try to raise money with bake sales and other things like that.

Hosting a tournament is arguably the most common.

Lots of community stores/restaurants will help you do "fundraiser nights." You could also sell sponsorships on shirts you wear.

Our team does "Penny a Point", where we go around and ask people to pledge a penny for each point we score on "It's Academic" (usually a five dollar bill is what we get). This can easily be adopted for any tournament and gets you stacks for days.

As others have said, hosting one or more tournaments is really helpful for fundraising. Do the people on your team pay for each tournament they attend or does the school subsidize the fees?

For NHBB tournaments, try contacting your local historical society (and your state society if you make it to Nationals).

Glad to see Iowa getting some representation on this board.

There does seem to be a dearth of tournaments in the area on that side of the river.

Why not put together a schedule of tournaments the team would like to attend, and take that to the relevant people to show them how serious you are?

Wow thanks for the suggestions!
@Fred I've already contacted some of the big buisnesses in the area. Hope I can get something out of them!
@lordhatefun... Intreresting idea but we do a hodgepodge of competitions and the points don't really translate...
@pk14ster What's the rate we can charge for those things? Plus don't we have to pay for questions and awards?
@dtaylor4 my coach convinced them to pretty much put up transit for us but he doesn't know how much cash we can squeeze from them and yeah it feels pretty lonely over here it'd be nice if more schools hop on board.

TheMostIntrestingAsianInTheWorld wrote:Wow thanks for the suggestions!
@pk14ster What's the rate we can charge for those things? Plus don't we have to pay for questions and awards?

Most tournaments cost ~$70-80 a team with discounts for buzzers/moderators/more teams (you can browse the "Regular Season Tournament Announcements" section to see what other people charge) whereas questions cost about $16 per team, depending on from whom you are getting the questions, and trophies and other costs will presumably be extant but not enough to remove any profit.

Also, as far as experience with my own team goes, we did a car wash once which was a rather successful fund raiser, and I can second Dave Madden's suggestion that Historical Societies (in at least our case) might be willing to fund history-related things.

I don't know if you have the experience to run one, but a tournament is probably one of the better ways to raise money. Maybe you can ask other high schools in the area to help out.

We are planning to host a tournament that will hopefully pay for tournaments throughout the year. You should try it if you can. Many sets are pretty cheap to mirror.

Good luck!

Last year, one of the clubs at our school hosted a Trivia Night - much more like pub trivia than Quiz Bowl, but there was only a little bit of pop culture and included local area knowledge like "name the 5 towns that border our town". Teams of 4 could enter for $100 and there was a $500 first prize and runner-up prizes as well. They sold baked goods too. It was very successful for them, much easier to write questions, and they had a few silly prizes for best dressed team and best team name and such. They held it in the evening in the cafeteria and teams of teachers, students, parents, local people who go to pub trivia type things entered. I think they made over $1500 and it was fun for them too. They had a limit on the number of teams that could enter in order to keep it manageable.

If they don't do it again, I'm going to ask them if they wouldn't mind if we did it.

Due to school district rules, we can't receive school funding, so we've always had to find numerous ways to get money (fortunately, thanks to our awesome benefactors, they make our team possible and alleviate a lot of the costs). One of the things we decided to try was something with a local restaurant.

If any of your local restaurants do the bar time/pub time trivia (like Buzztime), see if they are amenable to running a co-op fund-raiser with your academic team, better on trivia night. The Buffalo Wild Wings in Lancaster (where my school is) gets a lot of business from students that go to my school on Wednesday nights for trivia night. Since its kind of a given that all of the members of our quiz bowl team does it, we managed to work out a special trivia night fund-raiser this spring with a set % of the bills of the participants going to our team. How much we got was ultimately contingent on who we managed to get to go, and having a school population of 220 students (less than 100 families), it was difficult to get as many people as we would have hoped, but nonetheless it was fun and it racked in some money. Make sure if you do pursue that option that you emphasize to the people you have going that they have to actually buy food and not just beer, which happened a few times in our case.

And if you do pursue that option, I'd take into consideration what time of the year it'll be in, because some people who'll go may want to go to the wing joint because they have good food and they'll be showing sports. When we had ours we had the pleasure of having both the NBA and NHL on different screens in addition to spring training, which proves to be better than having say the WNBA and not so entertaining baseball games.