5 Tips for Collecting Box Tops™

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of General Mills®. The opinions and text are all mine.

Last week I shared how my family and I were raising funds for our school by collecting Box Tops™ labels from our everyday purchases. We keep a jar in our cupboard to hold all of our labels so that they don’t get lost. Then, when our school makes the announcement to bring in the labels we know right where to find them!

My kids love to be involved and take turns cutting out the labels once we are done with the boxes.

We were able to collect over 100 labels to give to our school last year and this year we hope to do even better! Here are a few tips to increasing Box Tops™ label collections at your school:

• Give the students incentives to collect labels – You can hold a contest between the classes and award a prize to the class that collects the most labels.
• Ask friends and family to collect for you – This is how we were able to collect so many labels last year. There are a lot of people we know who do not have kids in school so we made each one of them their own jar to collect the labels and then emptied to jars when we came over to visit.
• Use Box Tops™ labels as currency – We have a student store on campus where the kids “sell” items that have been donated by families such as $1 bin toys, stickers, school supplies, etc. The student can “buy” these items with Box Tops™ labels. You can also have families “pay” for admission to school functions with Box Tops™ labels.
• Set a goal to reach & make it obtainable – It will motivate families to bring the labels in and remember to collect them if there is a goal set. At our school we have about 400 students. If each student brought in 25 labels we would raise $1000 – 25 labels doesn’t sound like a lot over the span of a school year!
• Make a progress chart as a physical reminder – Have the student council create a poster showing how close the school is to their goal each month and hang it in the front office for everyone to see.

Right now, if you shop at Walmart you can look for select General Mills products that are offering BONUS Box Tops™ labels! I like to keep the Fiber One Brownies and Lemon Bars on hand as a filling late night snack, on each box I received 5 Box Tops™ labels! Can you believe that? I got 5 labels just to eat dessert. That’s what I call a Win Win!