The Overlooked Fundraiser for Youth Softball Leagues and Nonprofits

The main sources of funding for a youth softball league are individual registration fees, league-wide fundraising, corporate sponsorships, and perhaps revenue from concession sales. However, as the cost continues to rise, it becomes more and more difficult to increase the individual fees and also get the corporate sponsor. Also, if the truth is known, the player’s parents collect a large percentage of the candy sales. I can’t tell you how many oversized boxes of chocolate bars I’ve bought over the years so my daughter wouldn’t have to pester the neighbors with her dole-eyed sales pitch.

The advantage of typical league funding sources is that they produce a significant amount of revenue. The downside is that all of these methods of generating income require an inordinate amount of time and effort. Even something as simple as simply collecting registration fees requires many hours of work. Try finding fifty corporate sponsors and see how long it takes. And the candy fundraiser, I can’t imagine the total number of hours we spend knocking on doors.

What if there was a passive means of generating income for your Softball League or any non-profit organization? What if there was something the league could spend an hour on and it would generate revenue for the league from now on? It wouldn’t even matter how much money you made, as long as you generated income 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, for years and years to come. I have good news for you.

Earlier this year, I surveyed over 300 youth softball league websites. There were some really cool sites and then there were some that were pretty simple. Some of the sites included a list of their corporate sponsors and some did not. But NONE of the sites had ads provided by Google. OMG what a GOLDEN opportunity each one of these leagues is missing out on.

Let me explain how this works. Any person or entity with a website can ask Google to receive advertisements placed on their website. It takes about five minutes to read the information from Google and submit the request. It is absolutely free to apply and join. Once this is done, Google will review the site and either approve or disapprove the request. I can’t imagine then denying any non-profit softball league.

Once approved, Google will notify the applicant via email and provide a code for the league’s webmaster to copy and paste into the league’s site pages. The web master can determine the placement of the ads, at the top or bottom of the page, or where they think is best. Don’t worry, Google doesn’t put those horrible pop-up ads on your site.

Once the ads are on the site, when a site visitor clicks on an ad, revenue is generated for both Google and the website owner, or in this case, the Softball League. Google tracks all clicks and associated revenue, and when that revenue reaches a certain threshold, Google makes a direct deposit or mails a check.

Google has done an excellent job of coding its ads so that only relevant ads appear on web pages. Since we’re discussing softball leagues, I suspect the ads would be mostly softball related. As such, they won’t seem intrusive to your league membership. In fact, they will probably appreciate the additional sources of information available to them.

It is impossible to say how much revenue this could provide to a softball league. I seriously doubt it will ever replace any of the existing revenue streams for softball leagues. However, it is essentially an effortless income that could ease the financial burden of playing softball.

I don’t think it’s a question of if a non-profit organization will allow advertising on their website, but when they will allow it. The truth of the matter about nonprofit organizations is that they all have two main goals. The first goal is to produce whatever they produce, in this case it would be to produce a fun softball league. The second goal is to raise money to support goal number one.

Is accepting advertising a foreign concept to non-profit organizations? Absolutely not. The baseball team I played on growing up was the Dr. Pepper Rockets. That was over 30 years ago when my league was accepting ad revenue. I think the only issue now is when these softball leagues will find out about the revenue potential their websites have. Once the secret is out, I suspect there will be a quick move towards website ads.