Panelists, Debora Jones of K-12 Clothing alongside Rebecca Yaffa & Joe Denomme of GooseChase take you through how to plan your school fundraising event, get maximum attendees, create fun and interesting missions, and the many ways you can fundraise effectively for your school.
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GooseChase Scavenger Hunt Experience
| 1. GooseChace Joined Games | 2. Mission Examples | 3. Player Submissions |
Read the Full Transcript
Jeanne:
Hi, everybody. Welcome to today's very exciting webinar. We're so thrilled to be able to teach you how to fundraise using a fantastic tool called GooseChase. We talked about it last month in our webinar with Deb Jones from K Through 12 Clothing and Deb reached out to our friends, Rebecca and Joe at GooseChase, to be able to figure out how we might be able to show you how to do it.
Jeanne:
The first thing that we want you to do is we want you to go to your phone, whether you have an Android or an Apple or whatever you have and download the app GooseChase. And once you've done that, you can sign in as a guest and type in the game code. It is not case sensitive, start the fun. I'm going to go back just a couple of steps here. Just give me one second that I can go back. And what we're doing here today is turning your school fundraising from mission impossible to mission possible.
Jeanne:
We are offering valuable prizes today. Today for the first place winner of GooseChase today, we're going to be offering $250 check made out to your school. Second place, a $100 check made out to your school. $50 is third place, not too bad, made out to your school. And then we'll give $25 Amazon gift cards to the rest of the people that are on this call. We really appreciate your attending today and we will be recording it. I just want to let you know we're going to be recording this. We'll be transcribing it. And my friend, Jen, that is on this call as well, backing me up. She's going to make sure it gets posted to the blog. I'm going to turn this over to you, Deb, and you can tell people what they need to do right now.
Deb:
Absolutely. Thank you everybody for joining. We're very excited to do something a little different today. We're going to get everybody active and actually engaged in doing a scavenger hunt. That way you get a real feel for how you could do this with your school to fundraise. After the scavenger hunt, we will talk about how to run this for your school. Some tips on how to fundraise and some sharings from what other groups have done.
Deb:
The first thing as Jean mentioned is download the GooseChase app on your phone and type in, start the fun. That is the game code that will take you to our game. There are a number of different missions there. Pay attention to the points for each mission. We're going to run the scavenger hunt for about 10 minutes, give you a chance to complete some of those missions. The top prize will be for the person with the most points. That's where I said pay attention to those point values. With that, we're going to start the fun and let you play the scavenger hunt. And we will reconvene here at 10:13 or 1:13, depending on your time zone, or if you're in the middle, one of the middle times zones, but we'll see you in 10 minutes.
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Deb:
We've got a couple of people actively really participating. In the event that you've joined the webinar a few minutes late. We are quiet here because we're in the middle of a scavenger hunt. Download the GooseChase app for your phone and type in, start the fun. We've got another eight minutes on the scavenger hunt. There's a couple of people really vying for that top spot right now. Jump on and join the scavenger hunt.
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Deb:
In case you're listening to this recording after the fact or have joined the webinar late, we're in the middle of a scavenger hunt here. I'm chiming in every couple of minutes. There are now a number of people actively involved. We've seen some really fun pictures of coffee mugs, pictures of indoor and outdoor shoes and skates do count as outdoor shoes. A lot of people sharing some great photos of their school websites and missions, which we very much appreciate. Lot of fun, different missions going on here. Videos, photos, texts, lot of great ways to engage. And we have about six more minutes here left in our scavenger hunt. The leaderboard is getting full with people. Again, as a reminder, the top number of points wins $250 for your school. Second place, a $100 and third place $50. All participants also get a chance to win $25 for their school so please do participate. I love seeing the folks get the points up on the leaderboard.
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Deb:
Chiming in here again. We've got three minutes left in our scavenger hunt. Again, if you've joined us late, download the GooseChase app to your phone or device and type in game code, start the fun, and you can win money for your school. $250 for first place, a 100 for second and 50 for third and that is based on total number of points. Get in there, look at the missions and the total points and good luck. We'll see you back here in three minutes.
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Deb:
All right. We're in the final minute folks so get in those last points, complete the final mission. And in one minute we will start the tips and tricks part of the webinar.
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Deb:
All right, we are wrapping up the scavenger hunt here. I'm about to stop the scavenger hunt. The game has been stopped. Congratulations to all of those who participated, I will log in in a few minutes and just tally up the final scores. But for those of you who weren't able to join that portion of the event, we just spent the last 10 minutes running missions, getting active, taking photos, videos, typing in some texts to get points in order to win money for our collective schools.
Deb:
With that, we have a fabulous now discussion around how you can do this for your school to fundraise this year. It's a great way to get people engaged virtually as well as potentially in person, but for this year where a lot of things are virtual, this is a great tool to get people engaged and to continue your fundraising mission. We thought we would bring in our partners at GooseChase. welcome to Joe and Rebecca from GooseChase And we are going to talk a little bit about how to run a successful scavenger hunt. Joe and Rebecca, I'll turn it over to the two of you to just give a little bit of background about each of you. Why don't we start with you, Joe?
Joe:
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate it. Great to meet everyone virtually. And I'm Joe, I work on our sale team here at GooseChase and I worked directly with a lot of the schools and districts that we work with that use GooseChase either as a fundraising opportunity and tool or in their actual classrooms. I'm often talking with teachers and getting kind of ideas for how they can use it to get some fun learning opportunities for their students. And my main role is to help you think about your event in different ways, help you think about how to create some great missions and in this case earns some much needed funds for your school. Any questions that you do have, feel free to ask and then happy to help.
Rebecca:
Awesome. Hey everyone. My name is Rebecca. I'm the director of customer experience here at GooseChase. And that means I have the super fun job of helping all of our customers so that anyone who's planning a game or playing in a game, it's my job to make sure that everybody has a good understanding of how to use GooseChase, help out with any technical questions you have. And I love working with educators, especially now to create some really fun virtual activities for everyone to participate in safely.
Deb:
Thank you. And I can attest to the fact that Rebecca is a great help because she helped me set up this fun scavenger hunt that we just did. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Debora Jones with K-12 Clothing. I work with a lot of parents, PTAs to fundraise for their schools and in conversations with some of our schools on the East Coast, GooseChase came up as a great way to fundraise and people have had a lot of fun with it this fall. We wanted to share with all of you, what are the best ways that you can leverage this tool for your school? Rebecca and Joe, why don't you just give a bit of an overview? How easy, hard is it to find out and get started?
Rebecca:
Sure. I can launch off here. One of our big goals at GooseChase is making sure that our platform is super user friendly for educators and students of course. It's very simple to get started. You can sign up for free and use the platform completely for free for test games and small games. All you need to do is head over to our website, sign up with your email address and a username and password of your choice and then you can get started building your games right away.
Deb:
And in building the games, what are the different types of missions that you can include in a game?
Rebecca:
Great question. There are four different types of missions, so you can have your participants take photos, videos, answer text based questions or check in at a specific location using a GPS based mission. There's a lot of variety. In our experience the best games have a good mix of the different mission types with an emphasis on those photos and videos, which really drive the fun, engaging piece of the game.
Deb:
And if you're thinking about creating a game, let's say for an afternoon for a fundraiser or an evening for a fundraiser, how many missions should you be looking at to insert into your game?
Joe:
For sure, I can take that one, Rebecca, and really there's no one right answer. But what we always say, Debora is depending on the length of your game, have more missions than you think they can complete in the allotted time. We have some games that last a couple hours or 10 minutes, like the one we just ran and we have some games that last couple of weeks and even a couple of months. Having more missions than they can complete in the allotted time does a couple of things. First off, if people are having an amazing time and they're really enjoying the GooseChase game, they don't run out of things to do. There's always something fun for them to do. And like we saw with kind of the back and forth on the leaderboard as well, having more missions allows you to create some of the separation on that leaderboard, if you're awarding prizes.
Joe:
If you have a short game and only a short number of missions, everyone's going to complete the majority of them and then you might have a log jam at the top, which could cause some prizing issues. Definitely having more games makes that a fun competition, more missions and then as well, you can have missions that give something for everyone. Depending on the audience in the game or the class that you're working with, some might be super outgoing and love to do video missions and others might be a little more introverted and want to do more text based missions or GPS check missions. Having that good number based on the length of your game, gives something for everyone to find something that they would find fun and engage with the game.
Deb:
I imagine that there are some really creative people out there that come up with missions without any problem, but for us average folk, what is the best way to figure out some creative, fun missions? How do you know what to do?
Joe:
Yeah, for sure. Well, like Rebecca said, you can always go and test out a free version of our platform with up to three teams. That's always a great way just to get a sense for the types of missions that you can create, have some fun. And even if you don't consider yourself the most creative person, you're definitely going to think of some great ideas that fit for your game. But for those that want a little extra help, we do have a mission bank that are pre-created missions by us or by groups that we've worked with before that are just fun mission ideas that you can pull directly into your game if you don't want to do something completely custom.
Joe:
These range from social distancing missions right now that can be completed from the comfort of your own home. They can be holiday themed missions that a lot of you will have coming up as well. You can pull those directly into your game that we've already built. And then as well, you can still create your own custom missions if an idea strikes you. And then for our school partners as well, what's really exciting is we have an educator game library and what that is, are fully complete games that teachers have offered to share with our community that they've used in their classroom before. Whether that's a fundraising game, whether that's a game that they've used with their students for a specific subject, you can search through that library as a teacher and find something that might fit for your purposes. A lot of ways that we can kind of help you there, but it's always great just to get your hands in there and test it out.
Deb:
I think you bring up an important point that let's just spend a moment talking about before we move to the fundraising component is that teachers can use this in the classroom. One thing that I had not thought about because I came across GooseChase in the context of fundraising, but what were all the different use cases in education and teachers are using this to reinforce points that they're teaching in the classroom. Can you just spend a minute talking about some different ways that elementary, middle and high school teachers may be using scavenger hunt to support learning?
Joe:
Yeah, absolutely. And we're really passionate about giving teachers a tool to make learning fun. And what GooseChase is great at doing is really getting kids out of their seats and learning. Whether that's in a more traditional in class classroom setting or whether that's been something that's more remote, like a lot of teachers have been doing now, really it's something that just approaches the subject matter in a different way, as opposed reading from a textbook. It's a really great opportunity to make it fun, get some natural applications for the subject matter that just gives them some little extra energy as the students to explore. We have a lot of science classes right now that are going remotely that ask them to find different flowers or foliage or wildlife in their area in a way that they don't have to all be together physically in the same spot, but they can still appreciate the learning and be energized by that.
Joe:
We have a lot of our classes right now, as an example where students are sharing their creations via the GooseChase game. You're still sharing those with your students, with your classmates. There's a little bit of that competitive factor, which is always fun as well, but there's a bunch of different ways that you can use a platform, whether you're in classroom or whether you're unfortunately remote as well. In classroom is obviously a big part of what we do. Fundraising, but a PD day activities are great for teachers as well, whether it's just kind of a team building mission and game for your group or whether it's reinforcing again, the subject matter that the teachers are exploring on those PD days. There's again, no shortage of what you can do. Really the only ceiling is your creativity, but there's a lot of fun things that you can do to make whoever's learning really enjoy it.
Deb:
And I will say, I did take from one of the teacher banks for our scavenger hunt today with there was a question around pi and finding the US city that has a zip code containing the first five digits of PI. And so that is a math supporting type of question and congrats to those who got Savannah, Georgia, because that is the answer. But I thought that the teacher banks were a great place to pull from even for a fundraising scavenger hunt. And so switching gears to that, how are schools using scavenger hunts to fundraise?
Joe:
Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of, again, creative ways that schools are using it. In terms of how they functionally fundraise within GooseChase, there's a couple of main ways. The first would be charging some sort of registration fee in order to play the game. If that's, pay what you can or each family is donating something to get the access code to that game, that's kind of the first step where anyone who wants to play and support the school can do that. And then you give them obviously a pretty fun activity to do so registration fees are always a great way to get that buy in from the different school community members. The alternative as well would be sponsored missions or content within the game. I think some of you may have seen the mission in the game where we needed to take a photo of our favorite coffee mug. And that was sponsored by a local coffee shop.
Joe:
The things that you can do is go out to your local community businesses, create missions that will highlight their brand with their image and have mission details that require the players to interact with that business in some way. If this is a coffee shop in your local area, the mission could be, hey, go take a picture of yourself enjoying a coffee or a baked good in that area. You're obviously supporting that local business. You're giving the player something fun to do in the community and then there's a sponsorship component of that that would be passed back to your school. Lot of creative things that you can do with that, but if you do have that, luxury business sponsorship is always a great way to get that additional funding in for your school and your game.
Deb:
This year, a lot of schools are foregoing one of their big events, which is often an auction. Some schools are doing it online, but others are looking at different ways to convert that into something different. And so the auction is usually an event you would get a lot of in kind donations for. And what we've seen is schools getting in kind donations for something like a scavenger hunt event. You can use those in kind donations in a couple of different ways. One way that we've seen schools be successful is giving a door prize, I'm doing air quotes there in case you can't see the webinar component, to the first 50 registrants for example. And so it may be a small gift card. It could be an actual physical item, bottle of wine, something like that, but giving some sort of prize for the first 50 registrants or entering those 50 registrants into a raffle for some larger prize, maybe a spa gift certificate, something like that.
Deb:
The other thing that we've seen schools doing is doing door prizes throughout the event. Having the scavenger hunt on one evening, for example, and then giving prizes during that scavenger hunt. First person to 3,500 points gets a door prize and you have people delivering prizes during the event. And so this is something we talked about a little bit actually last month at our webinar, our panelists mentioned they had fairies in their school that were gift fairies that were dropping off a little presents throughout the event. And this was great to drive additional engagement on social media. People would post a picture of the prize being delivered to somebody's door. There would be a thank you from the person who received the prize and it would all be in the context of the scavenger hunt and so it would drive this further engagement.
Deb:
You can use that same concept before the events as well. If you're giving out these prizes for registrants again, pictures when the price is dropped off. Saying that the person is one of the first 50 registrants to the scavenger hunt and encouraging other people to register. These are some great ways to leverage those in kind donations that you may have used for other events in the past, for a virtual event and then to grind engagement and excitement about your event, which hopefully then will drive additional fundraising for your school.
Joe:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, we've had a lot of groups do similar things. Anytime you offer a prize, teachers specifically, students and families often are the most energized and excited when you have games like this. Any prize small or large will light a fire under them and get the competitive juices flowing in a really fun way. Like you said, prizes for the first to register, prizes for the first to complete certain missions or the funniest submission of the day. We've had people do prizes around that. A lot of fun that you can do and it's great to kind of keep that engagement going throughout the length of an event. We often work with groups that are transitioning from a more traditional fundraising event to obviously something remote now.
Joe:
They have done actually auctions within GooseChase with some of those in kind donations as well. We've had schools that have done a traditional bake sale type fundraiser where you'll have an image of a cake or a group of cupcakes that someone has baked or has done in the past. And you can bid using a text based mission on that item or on that service that someone is offering up. Again, it's a great way to kind of still keep that sense of community, do something similar to what you've done in the past, but make it fun and make it something that will bring some of those additional dollars in for the school.
Deb:
Yeah, that's a great idea, especially, we're coming up on the holidays here and bake sales are often something that is done around the holiday time. That's definitely a way that our schools can fundraise. And just to give the volunteers out there who may be running this offense of how long it takes, we did a 10 minute scavenger hunt. It probably took me three minutes to understand the tool itself and then I spent some time digging through other example missions just to get some ideas. Probably 10 minutes for that and then creating the missions, maybe another 10 minutes. And then I spent a little bit of time uploading a logo, doing a few other things that aren't necessary to execute on the scavenger hunt, but some of those little extras, so I would say a total of 30 minutes for the creation of the event and then using social media to promote the event, creating using something like Jamba, for example, to create some posts for social media, I would also then suggest outreach to a few other parents to get them involved in sharing on social media.
Deb:
All in all. I think you're looking at an hour to 90 minutes across several weeks to prepare and execute the event. It's really a minimal time investment for PTAs, PTOs, parent volunteers who may be running this. Joe, Rebecca, would you say that the average experience there for somebody who's creating one of these events?
Rebecca:
Yep. That's pretty much spot on, Debora. And then after you've learned how to use the system once, the amazing thing is the next event you run, or if you're sharing it with colleagues, is even quicker than that.
Deb:
And you probably get some really great mission ideas as well. Just seeing how things went the first time around.
Rebecca:
Yeah. Something we really encourage when appropriate is if you know you're going to be planning more than one, use a mission in your game to ask your participants what they want to see in the game and they'll give you ideas for missions.
Deb:
I like that. What are some of your favorite missions that you've either done or seen others do?
Rebecca:
Oh, that's such a good question. Something that was really special we saw near the end of the school year, last year, was educators using GooseChase as a virtual yearbook. When students were at home, they were able to submit their favorite memories of the year, photos of them with their peers and then some educators actually took all of those submissions and turned them into a digital yearbook to pass around. And that stands out to me as being really special.
Joe:
Absolutely. We have had quite a few of those towards the end of the year. Everyone was wanting to still give the graduating seniors that amazing experience that we've all had and didn't want the situation to take away from reminiscing about the great times that they had during school. That was really powerful. You're right, Rebecca. And from another standpoint, anything that kind of gets kids excited. We've seen some really cool things. We've had again, as a part of a fundraiser, we've had principals allow themselves to be put in a dunk tank or been pied in the face by some of their students just to have some fun, but obviously do it for a good cause. We had one school that shaved their heads for cancer research and they had the team post that in one of the missions. Some really special stuff, but really again, the limit is kind of the creativity so that we've seen some really, really positive things and things that have led to a lot of fun community building in these games.
Deb:
I love that. I think that the connection and engagement with others is something that people are craving so much during this time where a lot of people are at home. There's a lot of discussion about the social and emotional wellbeing of our children while they're not in school as in a lot of states they are not. And I think that this is another way to facilitate engagement. And even though it may not be in person, you're able to tell a story with a picture and what did you do over your winter break? Or some pictures of the school year in the yearbook example, I think are great ways for kids to still engage with each other and the parents to engage and get to know the other families in their school community. I love those. Any last tips for PTAs, PTOs, school leaders wanting to create a fundraiser?
Joe:
Yeah. Again, I think what I would always start with is build that test game for your team. Take them through it to give them a real sense of what it takes to build the game, but also what that experience might be like for the players and the families and use them and their creativity to give you some ideas. Teachers are always the most creative people and groups that we often deal with so leverage that as best as you can. Try that free test game. And in terms of where some of that additional funding comes in for games, always engaging the business community can be mutually beneficial. You can support those businesses that are struggling right now in your backyard and that's a great way to give you some of that additional funding in those games, as opposed to just putting that onus directly on the families in the school. That's always something that I would recommend you think about if that's an option that you do have to really kind of take that fundraiser to the next level.
Rebecca:
Yep. That's spot on Joe. And then from my end, something else that we always like to share is our blog, which is an awesome resource. There are tons of resources on there about how to actually use the platform, but then also case studies of how other groups have utilized GooseChase for fundraising. Feel free to check that out. It's just goosechase.com/blog.
Deb:
That's perfect. And if anybody has questions as they're going through creating a scavenger hunt, I know Rebecca was very helpful to me. I'm happy to be a resource. We've heard from some other schools, how they used the platform. Reach out to all available resource. Use those mission banks as they are tremendously helpful. Thank you very much, Joe and Rebecca, for sharing your tips. We did have the top three winners at 7,600 points, 3,300 points and 3,200 points. That first winner they're really hustled for their school. We do need to get the school names. And once we have the school names from the participants, we will share out which schools have won 250, $150. We appreciate everybody playing and hope you had a really great time and we do hope you will leverage this for your school to drive some engagement in your community and some additional fundraising. Jean, I'll turn it back over to you.
Jeanne:
Yes, thank you. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Joe and Deb. Thank you so much for being an excellent leader on this actual GooseChase. It was a lot of fun. I tried to participate but when you're producing the thing all I was getting was blurry stuff. I couldn't start looking up some things, but it was fantastic. Had a really, really good time and we look forward to using GooseChase again. And just a reminder to everybody on this call, we will be announcing the winners in a blog post before on the Squad Locker blog. Also sharing the information with K-12 Clothing and GooseChase and we appreciate your attending today. Thanks, Rebecca. Thanks, Joe.
Joe:
Thank you very much.
Rebecca:
My pleasure.
