Here are some ideas for using cash donations to improve your school.

Schools can buy student clothing for students who are too poor to dress well. This is good for the students, who will be happier and more confident, and for their parents and teachers, who will all be less stressed out by the kids looking sloppy. If there are regular donations, then the money can run out before it’s all used up. If a donation is made at a certain time of year or at one of several give-away times, then the money will be used up in a year or two.

Schools can buy supplies that would be too expensive otherwise: running shoes and gym clothes when they first start school; computers when they get a little older; art supplies when their talent emerges. Cash donations allow school administrators to use cash instead of taking out big loans which carry big interest charges.

Schools can set up classes for basic home-economics (cooking, sewing, keeping clean) which could attract volunteers from the community and would help keep parents from having to worry about their kids’ health and hygiene. If you’re going to have volunteers anyway, why not have them work on classes that teach their skills?

As we’ll see, money is an instrument for getting things you want: food, clothes, houses and cars. But it’s a blunt instrument. If you give a kid a $1 book allowance, it doesn’t help the kid get to read much more than if you had just given him the book, except that now the kid has $1 less to spend on other things.

So if you want a more powerful instrument, you have to make something else scarce. That is what cash donations do. They make things that are not scarce scarce. They move money from other things to books, or from books to teachers’ salaries.

The most obvious way of using cash donations is to buy books or teachers’ salaries with them. You can also use them for school supplies. Or for all sorts of purposeful purposes. Research says that kids who get a lot of cash donations—say, $300 a year—have better grades and test scores than kids who don’t get any donations at all (though there are no differences between their classmates).

The money you give to the school is your money, but it can do more than your money can. It can support programs that provide extra benefits to students and families. And it can be used to help the school’s mission.

Cash donations often have other implications as well. Suppose you are thinking of giving a donation to a school. Ask yourself: what if the school had never seen $100? Would you still have given? If not, have you considered how your donation might influence the school’s future?

The key to making a successful gift is to think about how your gift will be used. Sometimes giving is easy because you know exactly what you want it for—you want to endow a certain program or hire a certain teacher. But maybe there are other ways your gift could benefit the school—a new building or new technology for example.

Schools need relationships as much as they need funds or buildings, and many donors find that their gifts give schools additional resources that make both sides stronger.

The most obvious way is to buy classroom supplies. This is easy to do, and it has been effective. Teachers are often surprised by the money they get for supplies, but are pleased with the effect on the classroom. They say that students behave better when there’s something in it for them: even though a teacher can’t see the cash, she knows her students have something to work for.

But there are other things you can do with donations. The U.S. Department of Education’s website lists many ideas, from purchasing science lab equipment to making special programs for high-risk students or special teachers.

Not only can the money be used for a wide variety of things, but donations can come from all over the world. The best donation is one that is out of the way for you to get to. For example, if you are in a wealthy country and want to send something to your high school’s library, it is probably easier to send a check than it would be if you were in a poor country. Besides being more convenient, donations from rich countries often contain more things that are useful for high school students such as books, computers, and art supplies.

The high school I went to had an annual Halloween party, and I was the costume advisor. This meant that I spent a lot of time talking to kids about what they could do with money raised during the fundraising drive, and what they shouldn’t do with it.

One year, a boy wanted to be a beetlejuice costume. He said he wanted to donate his whole allowance to his school.

I was horrified at the thought of handing over $100 because my school needed $100 more than that, so I talked him out of it. He donated $10 instead, but some other students bought their own costumes and then gave the rest to the school. That year, the total amount of money raised for charity wasn’t enough for our entire school to have a get-together; we had to give some away to other schools who were having a smaller party for their staffs and students, too.

But in high school there is no limit on how much you can spend if you ask for it from your friends’ parents. So then I started telling kids they needn’t donate all they could spare; just give enough so that all their friends could have fun buying their costumes too.

Five years later, I’m still working as an advisor at that same

When I was in high school, my teacher had a field trip to a library. We brought back books and told the librarian we liked it, and then she gave us free passes to get more books. That’s the way it was supposed to work: someone helped you find what you wanted on your own, and then they gave you a pass that let you go back again.

But that’s not how libraries work anymore. They’ve got lots of computers with databases full of books, but they don’t want to give you a pass that lets you return again and again for free. They want you to buy your own books instead. A few years ago, the only way to get access to their databases was to buy print editions. Now they make electronic versions available for free or for a small fee, but nobody is allowed to bring their own book-on-paper copy into the library anymore. It’s all digital now: a real library is just a giant computer running on a university campus.