School fundraising gets a boost from local shoppers

Schools have long-relied upon the support of their local community to seek funding for additional items and excursions to ensure students have access to the latest in technology and educational experience.

Now, a shopping centre in Auckland’s north west region is utilising its platform to help eleven schools in what’s known as the North West Cluster via a new rewards campaign. The rewards campaign will see every dollar spent at the centre be eligible to be applied as a point towards a shoppers chosen school.

Rob Taylor, the principal of Colwill School, says, “Initiatives like this rewards campaign are a great way to support our school, particularly in providing funding for our music, art, ICT and PE departments. The resources required for these subjects are our school’s greatest need, and we rely on external funding for them, so having our local shopping centre’s support is really helpful to us.

“It’s great for our school and the rest of the cluster to get involved in the community. We know lots of our students don’t often travel far out of their suburbs, and we would love to be able to show them more of their city through school trips. It’s these sorts of shopping centre reward campaigns that give us the opportunity to do so.”

Linh Luong, senior marketing manager at NorthWest Shopping Centre, says the NorthWest Rewards campaign is simply intended to support the community. “We are often approached for help by schools and other community groups, which always have a need for extra funding. If we are running a rewards campaign, we want there to be a real reward that is valued by our shoppers and the community – and NorthWest Rewards for our local schools struck us as the perfect idea.”

Voters and schools can track each school’s progress in-centre or via the NorthWest Shopping Centre website.

The eleven participating schools are lined up to grab a share of a $6,000 total prize pool when the NorthWest Rewards campaign runs at the centre between 18 June and 22 July. All shoppers can participate by taking their receipt to Customer Service and submitting a vote for one of the 11 eligible schools – and as a bonus, every voter is entered in the draw for a $1,000 NorthWest shopping spree.

The dollar value of each receipt will be assigned to the school the customer votes for, and the total spend assigned to each school will then be divided by the number of students enrolled at each school. At the end of the campaign, the school with the highest average spend per student will win $3,000. The school with the second highest will receive $2,000 cash, and the third highest will receive $1,000 cash.

Participating schools are Huapai District School, Helensville School, ACG Sunderland, Waimauku School, Riverhead School, Massey High School, Hobsonville Point Primary, Hobsonville Point Secondary School, Colwill School, Waitakere Primary School and Kaipara College.