You can almost hear the cheers echoing from parents across the country- it’s back to school time! It’s the season for molding minds, but the beginning of the school year marks the end of SAA’s event season, and students aren’t the only ones headed back to the classroom.

After a summer of swims, we like to look back and evaluate ourselves. We’re always looking to improve! Here are the top three lessons we’ve learned from 2013’s events, and what they’re teaching us as we move forward.

1- We Can Take Our Events to the Next Level

We want to give people more to do at our swims without distracting from the main event. Our participants deserve the chance to celebrate their hard work and enjoy a well-run event! We’ve got plans for goodie bags from our sponsors, activities outside the water, and happenings to include the whole family all in the works for next season.

2- Selling Yourself Pays Off

When a participant registers for a swim, we give them a personal page on SAA’s website.  That page is used to track your fundraising and to advertise yourself to potential donors, and it can be made unique to you and your tribute team. This year, we noticed a huge correlation between the money participants raised and whether they edited their personal page or not. A little blurb on yourself serves to distinguish you and also to attract and excite potential donors, so why not do it?

3- Swag Makes Us Shine

In our effort to make a bigger impact, we’ve realized that we need to pay attention to growing our brand. With greater recognition of SAA comes higher participation rates, and ultimately bigger fundraising for our beneficiaries. We revamped our logo this year, streamlined the brand, and kicked it up a couple notches on our swag. Our t-shirts are softer, banners and arches are flashier, and we’ve got SUITS now!! Feelin’ great and lookin’ good is helping us grow, encouraging love for SAA and recruiting more team members in our fight for a cure.

We may not be stuck in those uncomfortable desk-chair combos from 10^th grade, but we’re always working to learn from our experiences at SAA.

Got a suggestion to help us learn more? Leave us a comment!