School Spirit Wear Ideas and Fundraisers to Boost Sales

Back-to-school is the time to think about school spirit wear fundraisers! School spirit wear is a great opportunity to show unity and togetherness while raising valuable funds for your school. Selling school spirit wear could be an exciting and effective way to collect money for school supplies, tech equipment upgrades, or enrichment programs. 

So, be creative, generate a buzz, and empower your students, teachers, and community with our best school spirit wear fundraising ideas and tips on boosting spirit wear sales. 

What is School Spirit Wear?

School spirit wear can be any type of custom merchandise and apparel designed to incorporate your school’s name, logo, colors, and even mascot. School-branded T-shirts, hoodies, beanies, pom poms, and foldable stadium chairs are popular school spirit wear products. Spirit wear is a great way to create a sense of belonging and togetherness as well as increase the visibility of your school’s brand in the community.

Best 6 School Spirit Wear Ideas To Improve Sales and Smash Fundraising Goals

Spirit wear for schools is always a popular choice to raise valuable school funding with little effort. But how much more could your school raise if you knew how to focus on boosting sales? 

Check out our six pro tips to increase spirit wear sales and watch your school fundraising goals soar! 

1. Celebrate Upcoming Graduates

Graduating students (and their parents) are often big spirit wear buyers, so make sure to represent them. Wanting to take school-branded merchandise away to college as memorabilia is a popular option. ‘Class of’ t-shirts and sweatshirts are best-selling school spirit wear items that help boost sales. To make an impact, why not create a special line of spirit wear products that uniquely represent the graduating year?

2. Increase Product Variety 

Providing a diverse range of spirit wear items will attract more customers. Offer something for everyone, and watch your spirit sales soar.

Here are a few examples:

• Update your online store with new products at different times of the year to draw in new clients and keep your regular buyers interested
• Make sure custom apparel comes in a variety of colors and sizes to promote inclusivity and body positivity among your buyers  
• Customize parents’ and family members’ spirit wear items—this is a great option for sports, as parents are usually their kids’ number one fans! 

Just remember to offer a variety of spirit wear options, but not too many. Providing more than 4-5 colors for a specific product is probably too many and can lead to buyer fatigue.

3. Create Hype 

The more people that know about your school spirit wear, the more potential sales you have. Get the word out, generate hype, and maximize outreach for your school spirit wear items. 

Best ways to promote your spirit wear:

• Use all the latest social media trends, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tik Tok, and YouTube, to motivate your supporters to buy. 

• Post fun videos, engaging stories, and interactive polls on Instagram and Facebook Stories to add a personal touch and sense of community and get people talking about your school spirit wear. 

• If you have a celebrity or influential parent at the school, why not ask them to post something on social media with them wearing some of your school-branded apparel to motivate others to buy?

• Advertise your store in school newspapers and newsletters, school flyers, and your school website.

• Why not set up a social media hashtag challenge (#spiritwearfriday) to get people participating and familiar with your cause? This has been a popular social media trend with a number of charities recently.

4. Target a Specific Project

A great way to get students, parents, and staff excited about buying school spirit is by setting out a specific goal they want to support. If your buyers know exactly where their money will make an impact, it’s more likely they’ll give generously. This could be a school field trip, expanding or remodeling the school library, or saving after-school classes at risk of being cut. To motivate your donors and boost spirit wear sales, why not set up a free fundraising page where they can follow the campaign’s progress with gamification tools like fundraising thermometers?

5. Offer Discounts

People are always looking for a good deal, so why not lure more supporters in by offering attractive discounts? Whether it’s a 3×2 offer on spirit wear t-shirts or money off when the purchase is bought in conjunction with a fundraising raffle or school fun run tickets, you’re bound to increase sales. 

Our free school spirit stores allow you to generate coupons and promo codes to make discounts easy to manage.

6. Set up Multiple Streams of Income

Maximize profitability with your online store by adding donation functionality to increase giving options. Apart from selling school spirit wear online, give people the option to make extra donations to your school’s cause through mobile giving and achieve your fundraising goals in no time at all. When possible, host add-on fundraising campaigns to optimize profitability.

Create a free account and see how we can help your organization smash your fundraising goals!

Start Fundraising

Best Ideas for School Spirit Wear Fundraisers 

School spirit wear fundraisers are a great way to get your school involved and raise money for the upcoming year. Get your community involved in collecting money for a good cause and make an impact.

If you’re stuck with where to start, follow our top school spirit wear fundraising ideas and how to make them work best for your school and its community.

Fun Spirit Wear Fundraisers for Elementary Schools

Tape a Teacher to the Wall: This fundraiser will excite the kids to raise donations. Each student pays a small fee, say $1, to apply duct tape to a teacher or the principal until they are completely stuck to a wall. Once the fundraising goal is achieved, they can be released. To boost spirit sales, why not use school-branded duct tape?  

School Carnivals: The great thing about a school carnival fundraiser is there’s something for everyone. These types of school fundraisers are fun and can be extremely profitable. Many schools offer free admission to their carnivals so everyone can attend, with game tickets being sold. Include all kinds of games for kids and their families, including a bouncy house, win-a-fish, lucky duck, and soda toss ring games, to name just a few. Cotton candy, pizza, popcorn, and beverages bring in extra funds. Raffle donated goods at the event, and add a fundraising auction for extra allure.

School Spirit Ideas for Middle Schools

Spirit Wear Design Competitions: Set up a custom t-shirt or mascot design competition as part of the arts program and allow the school community to vote on the winners. Seasonal design competitions are popular too. So, get your students thinking about festive Christmas-themed ugly sweater designs or spooky Halloween spirit wear accessories.

• If you’re looking for a unique spirit wear design competition, how about a spirit sleeve contest? Custom-designed spirit sleeves are a fun and versatile product that can be worn to show support at sports games, to keep you warm on a fresh morning walk or simply as a fashion statement.  

Breakfast or Lunch Fundraisers for the School: A gourmet breakfast fundraiser or a chili cook-off is a fun idea for middle school fundraisers. The options for incorporating extra fundraising events, like raffles or silent auctions, are limitless. Offer a prize for the best dressed in school spirit wear.

Spirit Wear Fundraisers for High Schools

School Spirit Dress-Up Ideas: School spirit days, or school spirit dress-up days, are always popular fundraisers. Students give a small donation to wear a costume and dress up to an elected theme for the day. It’s a great way to unify the students and encourage school spirit. 

Ideas for dress-up fundraisers are limitless, so here are a few of our top ideas for spirit outfit themes to get you started:

• Funky Hair Day: Go crazy with temporary color, gel, wires, ribbons, etc
• Twin Day / Multiplicity Day: Students dress alike with one or more friends
• Ancient Day: Students dress up like they are really old
• Pajama Day: Students arrive at school dressed in their pj’s and slippers – just make sure they don’t fall asleep in class!
• Spirit Day: Here’s a chance to show off all those new school clothes and colors.

School Spaghetti Fundraiser: Who doesn’t like to get together, eat delicious food and raise money for a good cause? Organize a school spirit pasta fundraiser with custom pasta in the shape of a certain sport, school logo, or holiday. Simply charge a fee per ticket, choose a venue, and make it a weekend event to optimize attendance with school students’ families and friends. 

Setting up a School Spirit Wear Online Store

It’s one thing to design eye-catching and popular spirit wear, but it’s useless without sales. An online store is the best way to sell your fun selection of school-branded merchandise.  

The benefits of a school spirit wear online store are:

• Your fundraising campaign is easy to manage
• There’s nothing to set up or take down as it’s virtual  and contact free
• Supporters can buy simply and quickly online from any device, at any time, from anywhere  
• It’s a low-risk fundraising option

Follow our simple step-by-step guide on how to set up a free online school spirit wear store.

Conclusions on School Spirit Wear Ideas

School spirit wear fundraisers are a must if you want to raise valuable funds for your school and ignite community spirit. Simply selling spirit wear will help cover the costs of many school initiatives, but with focused attention on boosting sales, your school could exceed your fundraising goals in no time. So get your school spirit on and start fundraising!