Eight students were elected to the Fund Raising Leadership Committee (two from each class) and they, in turn, elected a chairperson. The committee estimated that it would cost a total of $18,270 to send the team to Bakersfield. This amount would cover the team's air fare, hotel accommodations, meals, and ground transportation.

The next order of business was to decide what type of fund raiser to have. After much discussion, it was agreed that the school would sell custom phone cards and FunRaisingFunds.com was selected as the supplier. The committee chose phone cards because of their universal appeal and ease of handling.

Next, the committee determined that the $10 denomination would be the easiest to sell in their community. Now the committee was prepared to do their first calculation, which was to determine how many phone cards the school needed to sell to reach their fund raising goal.

To figure out how many phone cards had to be sold, the committee simply multiplied $10 by 40% (school's sales commission) to determine their profit per card ($10 x 40% = $4). Next, they divided the monetary goal by their profit: $18,270 ÷ $4 = 4,568. The total number of phone cards to be sold is 4,568.

Knowing that the student population was 1,256 (316 Freshmen, 224 Sophomores, 370 Juniors, and 346 Seniors), all that was left to do was calculate how many phone cards each student had to sell. This was done easily by dividing the total number of cards to be sold by the total number of students in the school: 4,568 ÷ 1,256 = 3.6 cards per student. They rounded this amount to 4 cards per student.

To make things interesting, FunRaisingFunds.com offered prizes for the top selling positions. The student who sold the most cards would win a Dell computer, with 19" monitor. The second place winner would receive a $500 gift certificate to the clothing store of their choice. Third place would win a $250 gift certificate to their favorite mall, and the fourth place winner would receive a Mini CD Player. (See Profit Grid page for prize qualifications.)

In addition, the committee decided that the class that sold the most phone cards would receive all the money raised above and beyond the monetary goal. The excess money would go into the senior-prom fund of the winning class.