From the PTO web page:

The Fuss about Scrip

It’s got a funny name and a relatively short history, but scrip fundraising can be a powerful tool. Want the scoop on scrip? Read on.

By Alicia Miller with Tim Sullivan

Picture this: You make your usual weekly visit to the grocery store. You fill your cart as always — with fresh fruit or frozen french fries, tenderloin or tofu — and head up front to check out. Your purchases are scanned and bagged, you get your total, and you pay your $100. Guess what? You just made $5 for your kids’ school. On the way home, you pick up a video and a pizza. There’s another $1.10 for good old AnySchool Elementary.

How’s that possible? Welcome to scrip, a decade-old fundraising concept with roots in California and a large, national future. The concept is simple. Schools purchase gift certificates, or scrip, from popular retailers (like Pizza Hut and Blockbuster and grocery chains) at a discount, which the retailers are happy to give because they’re guaranteeing themselves customers and some goodwill advertising. Parents then buy the gift certificates from the school at face value. The difference in price is kept by the school. Parents then spend the scrip at the retailer, where it’s worth the full face value; they haven’t spent an extra dime to help the school, nor have they had to change stores.

And school earnings can really add up. The most successful scrip schools earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from scrip. Typical schools with modest programs can earn $3,000–$10,000 without an undue amount of effort.

Some quick math is the best way to demonstrate the earning potential of scrip. An average family spends $5,000 at the grocery store ($100 per week). The school gets a 5 percent discount on grocery scrip. Over the course of the year, the school makes $250 (5 percent of $5,000) just from one family’s grocery bill. Now consider what that family might spend on pizza and gas and toys, items with typically higher discount percentages. And don’t forget holiday shopping. Multiply that family’s earnings by, say, 20 families and you’ve got $10,000 for your school. With the right support, scrip earnings can really add up.

Started by Necessity

Scrip programs got their start in 1988 with a plan to raise desperately needed funds for Petaluma, California’s St. Vincent High School, which was facing closure due to financial difficulties. Store gift certificates had been around for a while, but no one had ever really tried to use them as a way to make money for nonprofit organizations. Participating in a grocery scrip program paid off to the tune of $30,000 for St. Vincent, and the National Scrip Center (NSC), the first and still the largest scrip broker, was born. As more and more schools tried to emulate St. Vincent’s success, the NSC stepped in to facilitate the process for northern California Catholic schools. Since its beginnings, the National Scrip Center has helped schools and other nonprofits (Catholic, public, and private alike) raise more than $98 million.

The NSC’s success spawned competitors both within California and across the country, and today thousands of schools (heavily weighted toward the West Coast and northern Midwest) participate.  Most schools today choose to work with a scrip broker such as the NSC to avoid the coordination nightmare of trying to enlist merchants on their own and to ensure the deep discounts obtained when a scrip center buys gift certificates in large volume. Scrip brokers retain a small portion of the school’s profits in exchange for their services.

“I believe that scrip can be a very successful ongoing fundraiser for any group,” says Donita Hammerstein, who coordinates the scrip program at All Saints Catholic School (ASCS) in Canton, Michigan. ASCS has used scrip since 1997 and works with the Great Lakes Scrip Center, as well as buying scrip directly from several area grocery stores. “ We have seven volunteers assisting with our program,” Hammerstein says. “On Tuesdays they spend approximately two hours processing the orders, including entering them into our computer and doing the banking paperwork. The order is received on Thursdays, at which time the volunteers check in the scrip certificates and then fill the orders for that week. On Friday mornings and afternoons, we have a volunteer at the school to hand out the filled orders.”

The Catch

While the impressive returns from scrip are very real, there’s still no such thing as completely pain-free fundraising. Where scrip gets high grades for its earning potential and for the fact that parents don’t have to spend an extra penny to help your school (they don’t have to buy or pay more; they just have to buy differently), successful scrip volunteers do spend a lot of time on their programs.

Unlike a chocolate or cookie dough sale with maybe four weeks of concerted effort and a definite end date, scrip programs run year-round. While most anyone will buy a roll of gift-wrap from your group, it takes an especially supportive parent to go through the gift certificate process every week or even just once per month. As a program grows larger, earnings grow, as well, but program administration can become a chore.

Knowing that, the scrip centers try to make life for scrip coordinators as simple as possible. Most recommend setting up your scrip program with a software management system for tracking all aspects of ordering, delivery, and accounting. Several desktop packages are available for purchase, and the newest tracking option from California-based IntelliScrip Solutions operates completely online.  

The need for scrip management programs becomes quite clear when you consider how much coordination is involved at the most successful scrip schools. Typical returns for schools are in the range of $20,000 to $25,000 a year, a sizeable sum that requires sizeable effort. Even a smaller program might make 26 scrip orders per year with 15–20 families involved in each order.

From a school page:

What is SCRIP?

The SCRIP program is the most painless way to raise money for our school. The Olum Center buys SCRIP from a donating vendor at a discount and sells it for face value. The vendor then accepts SCRIP at face value and the Olum Center keeps the difference! This difference is between 2% to 20% for local and national vendors depending on how much we purchase at a given time.

Is it difficult to use?

No way. Just pay for your purchases with your certificates as you would paying with cash, check or credit card. Albertsons is an exception. We will issue you a card to be scanned before your purchase is totaled. This will credit our Olum account and we will receive a quarterly rebate. There is no cost to the center or to you to have this card.

Who can use SCRIP?

Anyone can. In fact we encourage you to tell your family and friends about this and ask them to help support your child's childcare center. Many of the certificates make excellent gifts to give others.

Where can you use SCRIP?

Some of the vendors we have are Albertsons, Fred Meyer, Safeway, Oasis, The Gap, Eddie Bauer, Blockbuster and many more. Please look on the other side of the is sheet to find an ordering form with the percent we get from each vender. You may use your SCRIP at any of their locations, not just in Eugene. So send a gift certificate to friends and family in another town or state, they make great gifts.

Why do we need to fund-raise anyway?

Some may not realize that the tuition you pay does not cover all of the costs to care for your children. We are budgeted to raise $2,500 this year in fund-raising. So do your part in this painless, no-cost-to-you fund-raise. And please tell your friends.

From an investment analyst’s page:

National Scrip Center (NSC), a nonprofit fundraising organization based in Santa Rosa, Calif., helps other nonprofit organizations effectively raise funds by providing a variety of fundraising products, programs and services. Since its inception 14 years ago, NSC has helped its nonprofit affiliates raise more than $170 million net; $40 million of that amount was raised in the last two years. NSC charges nothing to join or participate in its programs.