For Teachers & Coordinators

Why your fundraiser gets quiet in the middle and what actually fixes it

4 min read  ·  Fundraiser tips

It happens every single year. The fundraiser launches, the energy is there, and then somewhere in the middle, things go quiet.

Not a disaster. Just a lull. And that's usually when someone says "I thought more families would've ordered by now."

Here's what's actually going on: most parents saw the brochure, thought "I'll do it tonight", and then school pickup happened, dinner happened, life happened. They didn't say no. They just got busy.

The schools that do well aren't doing more. They're just staying visible.

No fancy campaigns, no big reinvention. The schools with the strongest participation tend to do one simple thing: they show up again mid-fundraiser with a reminder. Sometimes two.

One school last year had the most typical pattern. Strong start, quiet middle, nervous emails from staff wondering if something was wrong. They didn't change a thing about their fundraiser. They sent one reminder email, posted a graphic from the marketing toolkit in their parent group, and added a line to the school newsletter. That was it. In the final week, orders picked up again because families who had been meaning to order finally got reminded at the right moment.

The message doesn't need to be clever. Something like this works just fine:

A quiet middle doesn't mean something is wrong.

It just means families haven't thought about it recently, and that's one of the easiest things to fix. Not with urgency or pressure, just with a friendly reminder at the right moment.

That's exactly why the Display My Art marketing toolkit exists. So when things get busy (which is always), you're not starting from scratch. Grab an image, post it, done. Because "easy to post" almost always beats "perfectly crafted."

Written by the team at Display My Art — people who've watched thousands of fundraisers and genuinely want yours to go well.