This is a sponsored post. All opinions are my own.

Let’s suppose your school or club needs to raise some money. You could keep it simple with something like a bake sale, but you might need to have quite a few of those if you’re short more than a few hundred dollars. To raise more money, you’d need to hold some kind of event or have students take orders for cookie dough or magazine subscriptions.

All of these will get the job done, but they take an incredible amount of time and effort; that’s time and effort we should be using to learn.

Well, there’s another option now that is much, much simpler: Keeka earphones.

How it Works

The process is so straightforward, you’ll think you must be missing something.

Step 1: Your school orders however many boxes of earphones you think you might sell. Don’t worry about ordering too many; Keeka will buy back any unopened pairs you don’t sell. Each pair costs you $3. A box of 20 is $60.

The box, by the way, is actually a “tote” with a handle, and it contains an assortment of earphone styles.

Once you open the box, it converts to a display case:

Step 2: You sell the headphones at $10 apiece to students, parents, community members. (This price is right in line with the market: Similar low-price earphones range from about $9 to $15.) These sales can happen at school events, during lunch, or even out of a teacher’s classroom. For each pair, your school gets a $7 profit. So for every box of twenty sets, you earn $140. That adds up quick!

Schools do pay for shipping on the boxes, so that cuts into the profit somewhat. I went through the checkout process to see what it would cost. To ship a single box to me in Kentucky would cost about $10, so that would actually mean a profit of $130. But when I added more boxes, the shipping cost only went up to $19, and it stayed there even after I went up to 10 boxes, so it seems that if you order a lot of boxes, the shipping costs take a much smaller cut of the profits.

Step 3: Actually, there isn’t a step 3. That’s it. You order the earphones, then sell them and keep the profit. If you run out of earphones and need more boxes, just order them online and Keeka will ship them the next day.

Now when you think about all the order forms, pep rallies, motivational prizes, and other nonsense associated with your typical fundraiser, doesn’t this just seem ridiculously easy?

Everyone Needs Earphones

I don’t need more cookie dough. I definitely don’t need more magazines. And when I bite into the world’s best chocolate I just bought from the kid who turned up on my doorstep, I never, ever exclaim, “This really is the world’s best chocolate!”

But everyone needs earphones, right? I mean, every school year, earbuds turn up on all of my kids’ school supply list. With all the device-based activities and personalized learning going on in schools, this makes sense. But before the year is over, they have inevitably been lost or broken and need to be replaced. For my three kids, at roughly $10 per pair, I would guess I spend anywhere from $60-$100 every year just on earbuds. Some of that money might as well go to their school.

But Are They Good?

This was my question. The earphones looked really cute online, and I liked the simple concept, but I certainly didn’t want to recommend this product to schools if the earphones were flimsy or didn’t work. So I asked Keeka to send me a few pairs to try out.

The first set was from the Petal Power collection. These sets include a built-in mic and a little clothespin you can use to clip the earphones to your clothes. Every pair of Keeka earphones comes with a unique “extra” item like this, something that helps organize your earphones, store them, or keep them from getting tangled.

The other set was from the Do-Re-Mi collection. Each set in this collection comes with its own storage tin, plus the built-in microphone(all earphones come with the microphone). My son liked these because, in his words, they were a more “boyish” color:

When my 10-year-old daughter started to open her package, the first thing she said was, “Well, the box is definitely easier to open than any other earbuds I’ve ever gotten.” As someone who has wrestled with my fair share of plastic packaging, I’d say that’s a huge plus.

The sound quality was just the same as what you’d get from other similarly-priced sets. After using them for a few weeks, both sets still worked just fine.

Worth a Try

If this program looks as promising to you as it does to me, consider giving it a try this spring for one of your smaller clubs or teams. That will give you an idea of how well it works and whether it might be something you use for a bigger fall fundraiser.

In the meantime, start dreaming about what to do with all the time and energy you’ll get back when you drop your old fundraising program. ♦

Learn more at keekafundraising.org.