Scrip

Sales of Best Western gift cards are temporarily suspended because of system-wide computer problem.

Fazoli's is now available in $25 denomination at 7% discount.

The Scrip order form is available online for summer orders.

The following is a list of times scrip orders will be taken over the summer. In addition to the times listed, Mrs. Collins will be available every day of SPA IV (Aug 1 - 8) 30 minutes before rehearsal ends.

1. Tues. June 6, 6:30-8:30pm
2. Tues. June 13, 6:30-8:30pm
3. Tues. June 20, 8:00-9:00pm
4. Tues. June 27, 8:00-9:00pm
5. Tues. July 18, 8:00-9:00pm
6. Tues. July 25, 8:00-9:00pm

To encourage participation in the scrip program, the leadership team has decided to turn up the heat and make scrip competitive! Everyone in the program has been divided up into a number of groups. The group that has sold the greatest dollar amount of scrip will win a pizza party at the end of the six-week grading period. The board in the band room will be updated weekly with team recaps and a bar graph. Don't miss out on the action!

Golden Alliance does scrip through Great Lakes Scrip Center. You can view a list of participating retailers here. Jennifer Collins is the scrip coordinator for the Golden Alliance. If you have questions or concerns regarding the scrip program, you can contact her at jenblossom@verizon.net.

The following comes from the Great Lakes Scrip Center website

What is Scrip?

Scrip is a term that means "substitute money".

When your organization members purchase scrip, they're purchasing negotiable gift certificates that are used just like cash. The scrip is issued by the national and local retailers where many of your organization families already shop. These merchants want to support non profit organizations, and in return ask you to support them by shopping with scrip at their stores. Your organization members can use scrip to purchase everyday expenses like food, clothing, and other essentials, and with every purchase, they earn revenue for your organization.

How scrip generates revenue for you.

The Great Lakes Scrip center acts on behalf of churches, schools and other non-profit organizations to purchase large amounts of scrip from grocery stores, department stores, and other retailers. Because the scrip is purchased with cash up front, the participating retailers offer a substantial discount. Your organization buys the scrip from Great Lakes Scrip Center at a discount, and re-sells the certificates to your organization members for full face value. The bulk of the discount - from two to fifteen percent or more - is retained by your organization as revenue.

Scrip is "shopping cart fundraising".

The reason for the effectiveness of scrip is simple: families generate revenue through purchases they would make anyway. Groceries, clothing, toys, gifts, even gasoline can be purchased with scrip. An organization of 150 families easily spends between one and two million dollars per year on food, clothing and other essentials. If these families use scrip for these purchases, they can raise as much as $40,000 to $80,000 per year for their organization --without spending an additional penny.

Retailers like Scrip, too.

Families who purchase scrip certificates actively support the retailers who participate in this program. The reason is simple... they know that buying from a scrip participating retailer provides a steady source of revenue for their church, school, or non-profit organization.

A Scrip Story

Hi. My name is Joe Scrip, and in just six months my family saved $402 by participating in the Golden Alliance scrip program. I actually don't exist, but my story serves as an example of how successful you can really be with this Scrip program. This is my story.

My parents felt that the requested donations for band were getting too high for them to pay, so they decided to start doing scrip. We don't do anything half-baked, so we decided to go six months with as much scrip as we possibly could and see what it got us.

• My mom commutes to work daily, which requires $65 worth of gas a week. Over the course of six months, that's $1,755. She bought all her gas at Shell (2%), which worked out to $35 for us.
• According to my parents, my family spends about $375 a month on groceries. Shopping at Stater Bros. (5%) for six months, we spent $2,250, which earned us $112.50.
• My family only eats out every once in a while. In six months, we ate at Chili's (11%) a total of three times, spending about $55 each time, which is $165. We also ate at Applebee's (8%) three times, where we spent a total of $150. Those dinners earned us $18.15 and $12, respectively.
• My dad is a regular at Starbucks (7%) in the morning, and in the course of one week he spends about $18 there. Over six months he spent $486. All that mocha earned us $34.02.
• My mom eats lunch once a week at Souplantation (8%), where she spends about $8 for a meal. Over the period, $17.28 came back to us. She also occasionally eats at Pick-Up Stix (12%), about every other week, where she spends $9 a meal. Add another $15.12 to the student account. My dad has a similar lunch schedule where he eats out twice a week, so we'll estimate another $32.40 for him too.
• I spent $35 on afternoon meals at Jack in the Box (4%) when I stayed after school a few times for extracurricular activities. Using scrip I got $1.40 of that back.
• Our family has a tradition of buying pies for family events, so for three holidays we spent just under $50 on Marie Callendar's pies. With Marie Callendar's impressive 18% discount, we got $9.
• On Mother's Day, my mom bought flowers for my grandma and great grandma from 1800Flowers.com (8%). For two bouquets and delivery, we spent $60, and we earned $4.80.
• A pound of See's Candies (25%) for Valentine's day and another as a gift totaled $28.20. We kept $7.05.
• Two of my cousins had birthdays, and both times we bought them gifts off of Amazon.com (4%). Spent total of $60; we kept $2.40.
• My sister and grandma are Barnes & Noble fanatics, and between the two of them, they spent $150, which earned us $13.50.
• I am a big music fan, and I buy a lot of my music from the iTunes Music Store (5%). I spent just under $100 on iTunes in 6 months, which earned me $5.
• My dad and neighbor did some work on the backyard and front yard; fixing fences, planting new plants, repairing broken sprinkler heads, and installing motion-sensing lights, in addition to purchasing some decorative furniture. They racked up a total of $350, which earned us $14 at Lowe's 4% rate.
• We finally upgraded to a big screen TV, wich was $450 at Best Buy (2%). Add another $9 to the list.
• Our family went to the movies (Edwards Cinemas - 8%) twice. Including tickets and concessions, that totaled about $100, of which we got to keep $8. My sister and I spent another $100 on dates and with friends at the movies, which is another $8.
• We spent $80 at Staples (5%) for office supplies, school supplies/projects, and home office needs, of which we kept $4.

If you total up all the spending, we saved a grand total of $402. That was $402 of our own money that businesses let us keep for ourselves in return for choosing their business over one that didn't offer scrip. That was $402 more than we started out with, and that paid for almost all of my band fees for the whole year! And that was only six months!

Imagine if we had taken that through the whole year... the grand total would be well over $1,000 because the six-month period we did our experiment in didn't include Christmas. Think about how much you spent at Christmas last year. Did you do any shopping on amazon.com? iTunes gift cards for anyone? Best Buy? Williams Sonoma? Barnes & Noble? Try to come up with a rough estimate, take a conservative 5% out of it, and that's how much extra you'd have in your student account right now to help pay for whatever you needed.

That expirement also didn't include any gas money for the dad, and even though he didn't commute to work, he still would have spent a pretty good amount on gas over the course of a year.

To sum up, SCRIP IS FREE MONEY FOR YOU!!! All it takes from you is a little planning. Most often the reason why people don't bother participating in the scrip program is that they don't like the little bit of planning they have to do to make it work. They don't see the worth in doing the planning for just an $8.40. But when you look at it from the six-month perspective, what would you rather have: $402 with a little planning or $0.00 with no planning? It's worth it!