13 ways to pay for school visits

My school visits are fairly affordable (please see School Visits link for fee schedule and program ideas) but I know it can be a struggle for schools to afford any “extras” these days. Hopefully this list of ways to pay for school visits will help you get the money you need to host a visit.

Grants. Search for grants for literacy, the arts, or grants specific to your state. Remember that most author visits cost between $500 and $2000 – a ‘just right’ amount for small grantors. Author visits meet many standards across the curriculum (think beyond language arts or library/media goals to include other subject areas like social studies, the arts, science, etc.), and everyone wants to support the curriculum!
PTSA. If you plan ahead, you may be able to get a yearly fund from your PTSA/PTO to support visiting authors or illustrators.
Fundraisers. Does your school or library have a yearly book fair? Perhaps those monies can be used to pay for an author visit. Or maybe you can hold a change drive to get an author or illustrator to visit. It’s amazing how quickly pennies and dimes can add up when the whole school is involved.
Make it part of your cultural arts budget. Many schools have a budget for the cultural arts. Authors and illustrators count!
Make it part of your school library budget. Times are tight for many school libraries, but occasionally there may be built-in funds that can be used for an author or illustrator visit. Even if it’s not part of the money that the school system provides, funds like the lost-book account are a possibility for discretionary spending.
Ask a local business to sponsor the visit. Depending on your school system’s policy, you could feature the business’s logo on flyers sent home to parents or in any press releases or newspaper articles you send out.
Ask a local service club to sponsor the visit. Promoting reading is a suggested service project of Kiwanis, for example, and other local service clubs may have similar goals.
Partner with other schools or libraries in your area to share fees. If you are hosting an author or illustrator from out of town you could share on travel and hotel fees. If you are hosting someone locally perhaps that person could spend a couple hours at your school and a couple hours at another.
Investigate local arts organizations to see if they fund author or illustrator visits.
Sell the author’s books. Many publishing companies will give schools a discount if they order in bulk; you could make up to 40% of the cover price on each book you sell. A note: this is a great perk to an author visit, but unless you pre-sell enough books to fully pay for the author’s visit don’t assume that you’ll sell enough the day of the visit to cover the whole thing. In any case, you should ask the author or illustrator if he or she will be selling and autographing books and find out the best way to arrange the sales ahead of time.
Title I monies may be used to pay for author or illustrator visits, although in these times of slim budgets the Title I $ are probably already spoken for…
Charge your students a fee for the author visit just as you’d charge them for a field trip. In other words, make the author visit an in-house field trip.
Raffle off the author’s books or “lunch with the author” or some other special author-related opportunity to fund the visit.
You tell me! I’d love to hear about creative ways you’ve funded author and illustrator visits at your school.