How are you paying for this trip?
Separate fundraising committee - If possible get someone who is not involved with the normal organization leadership to head this up. It takes some pressure of the normal leaders to keep the organization functioning.

Be creative for fundraisers - See the section on fundraisers we did a lot, raised over $30,000 in just over 18 months!

What is your limit for cost of the trip per person (actually paying)? - Taking away individual fundraisers you will need to set a cost for the trip, how much do you want group fundraising to cover and how much should each particpant put in? Will non regular organization members pay the same? or a different rate?

What to do if people don’t pay? - Someone has to be the bad guy and ask for the money. You need to come up with a plan so if someone doesn't pay their normal payment what happens. Can your organization afford to have non-payment? Maybe you want to offer a scholarship for those who are having financial problems. It is never nice to keep asking for money so try to address this before it becomes a problem.

Sample Fundraising Attendance Letters 

Sample Fundraising Commitment Form 

What costs are individuals responsible for?

What costs are the group responsible for?

Will trip participants need to purchase any food? Or is everything all inclusive?  We choose to have all food costs included except for meals in the airports. 

Will individuals have to buy certain activities on their own?

Plannig a budget can be one of the toughest things. If you have a prior history of a certain activity try to base your estimates on that. Some items to consider:

Food

Travel - Planes, Trains and Autombiles

Gear Transport

Activities

Camping & Hotels

Showers and Laundry

Permits

Gear

Here is a sample of our budget and final cost comparison:

Sample Budget

Sample Final Cost Comparison  

Plan in advance how you will be paying for everything. 

For the most part we used troop debit cards there were 5 people with them spread between the vans and the gear truck.  You will need to keep track of your daily max and might need to raise it the days that we bought the plane tickets and paid for vehicle rentals we would have exceeded the normal daily limit and had to get it moved to a higher daily limit.

What ever way you pay keep track of your receipts, I choose to log them into a lap top on a spread sheet so we knew how were doing on the budget.

Each van had a petty cash envelope to pay for things like showers, ice, fire wood, etc…

Make sure whoever is responsible for the envelope gets receipts so you can track your costs.

You take your best guess as to costs… with that said things change so have your reserve of extra money so you don’t have to worry about those unexpected costs.

Don’t have just enough money in your bank account to cover the exact cost of the trip.  You will encounter unexpected costs.  Plus things like bank reserves when using debit cards can mess up your balance in the bank.  The actual amount of reserves would depend on the size of the trip for ours I wanted to have about a $4,000 reserve that was over and above the trip costs.

Someone has to be responsible for the tedious task of collecting the payments from the group.  We choose to give deadlines but allowed for monthly payments to spread out the costs.  Also we have camp accounts for each scout this money would have to be factored in so they knew their costs.  I would send out monthly statements showing how much they paid in and how much they still owed.
Unfortunately it sometimes feel like a debt collector and it is not nice asking for money over and over but some times this has to be done. 

There are 2 types of fundraisers: Ones that benefit the individual and ones that benefit the group.

If you are raising money to be split amongst the group you need to have motivation, we used a point system with everybody expected to participate in at least half of the total fundraisers.  We did allow for a family substitute if the trip participant wasn’t available.  This seemed to keep it fair and everybody participated as expected.  This kept track of a google spreaadsheet that everybody could check and see how they were doing on fundraiser participation.  Also we would send out reminders with the payment notifications as to how they were doing with fundraisers.

Individual fundraisers have direct benefit to the participant so motivation is on them the more they sell the better they do for themselves.  Fundraisers for us that fit into this category would be popcorn, wreaths, flower bulb sale, etc…