How to Run a March Madness Squares Fundraiser

A March Madness squares fundraiser is a squares pool run specifically to raise money for a cause instead of just for fun, using the NCAA tournament as the event that decides the winners. Youth sports teams and charities run them most often, though schools, workplaces, and community groups use the same format, because it's cheap to set up, easy for non-basketball fans to understand, and stretches across three weeks of games instead of a single Sunday.

The fundraiser version works the same way as a normal squares pool, with one difference in mindset: a portion of every dollar collected goes to the cause before anything gets paid out to winners. That single decision, how much stays with the cause versus how much goes back to players as prizes, shapes almost every other choice you'll make about pricing and payouts.

It also tends to work better as a fundraiser than a squares pool run purely for fun, since participants already expect part of their money to go toward something bigger than winning cash. That framing matters both for how you price the board and for staying comfortable with the compliance side, which the later sections cover in more detail.

Everything in this guide works whether you run the board on paper or set it up digitally with Play Squares. If your group would rather skip the printed grid and handwritten names, our March Madness squares page covers the digital version, including automatic number assignment and score tracking through every round.

The most common groups running these fundraisers are youth sports teams covering travel costs and gear for a season, and charities running a seasonal campaign around the tournament. Schools, workplaces, and community groups run them too, but those two are the groups you'll see reach for a squares fundraiser most often. None of these groups need deep basketball knowledge to pull it off, which is a big part of why the format spreads so easily once one group in a community tries it.

The same one-board, escalating-prize approach works just as well outside March Madness. If your group wants to run a fundraiser around a single marquee event instead of a three-week tournament, our Super Bowl squares page covers the single-game version of the same idea.

Compared to a bracket pool, where participants have to actually pick winners round by round, squares removes the skill requirement entirely. A coworker who has never watched a college basketball game in their life has exactly the same odds of winning as the office's biggest fan, since number assignment is random. That single feature is why squares consistently sells out faster than a bracket pool in mixed groups where not everyone follows the sport closely.

March Madness squares work by assigning every participant one or more boxes on a 10 by 10 grid, then randomly assigning the digits 0 through 9 to each row and each column once the board sells out. Every box now represents one possible combination of a home team's last score digit and an away team's last score digit.

At the end of a scoring period, whether that's a half or a full game, you take the last digit of each team's score and find where those two digits intersect on the grid, and whoever owns that box wins. Nothing about the format changes for March Madness specifically; what changes is that you're running this across an entire bracket instead of one game, which is exactly why the payout structure needs more thought than a single Super Bowl board.

The numbers should only be assigned after every square is sold and paid for. Assigning them earlier isn't fair: it can shut out late buyers who haven't joined yet, and it opens the door to disputes about whether anyone got a fair shot at good numbers. If you've never run a squares pool of any kind before, the Ultimate Guide to Hosting a Football Squares Pool covers the full five-step hosting process and the general best practices this guide builds on, and almost all of it carries over directly to basketball. This guide focuses specifically on what's different about running one as a fundraiser during March Madness.

One basketball-specific wrinkle worth knowing: the tournament technically starts with four First Four play-in games before the official 64-team bracket begins. Most fundraisers skip those and start their squares boards with the First Round instead, since the play-in games get little attention and add complexity for almost no benefit. Starting at the Round of 64 also lines up cleanly with the six-round payout structure covered in the next section, so nobody has to explain a seventh round that only applies to four teams.

The full bracket runs 64 teams once the First Four are settled, which means 63 games stand between the Round of 64 and a single champion. That single-elimination format is actually part of why squares works so well as a fundraiser structure for it: every game matters, nobody gets eliminated from the squares pool itself the way a team gets eliminated from the tournament, and a participant who bought into the Championship board stays interested in the outcome of every earlier round leading up to it, since the two teams that make it there were decided by everything that came before.

Pick a price that keeps your group engaged, fills the board, and gets you to your fundraising goal. A few concrete starting points to consider: $5, $10, $25, or $50 a square, though real fundraisers charge anywhere from under a dollar to $250 or more per square, and the right number for your group depends entirely on your goal and your audience, not on what some other fundraiser charged. A youth sports team covering a modest travel expense and a charity running a headline seasonal campaign can both use the exact same 100-square board at completely different prices, and both are doing it right.

Work backward from your goal instead of picking a price out of the air. Decide how much you want the fundraiser to bring in, divide by 100, and that gives you a starting square price before you decide how much of that stays with the cause versus how much becomes prize money. Then sanity-check that price against your actual audience: a group of 100 people who each expect to buy one square needs a price they're comfortable paying once, while a smaller, more engaged group might happily buy several squares each at a higher price.

Also decide upfront whether someone can buy more than one square. Most fundraisers allow it, since a supporter who wants to give more than the base price can simply claim two or three squares instead of one, which raises your total without changing the per-square price for everyone else. Just cap how many squares any one person can hold if you want the board to stay spread across a wider group rather than concentrated in a few hands.

Here's the math at three illustrative price points, just to show how the numbers scale, assuming you keep half of what comes in for the cause and pay out the other half in prizes. Your own price and split can land anywhere on this scale or well outside it.

The 50/50 split above is just one example, not a rule. Some fundraisers keep 70 percent for the cause and treat the prizes as a smaller thank-you for playing, while others keep 30 percent and lean on a bigger prize pool to sell squares faster. Decide your split before you sell a single square and put it in writing wherever you announce the fundraiser, so nobody argues about it once the tournament starts.

Plenty of fundraisers charge well above $25 a square too, especially for a tournament like March Madness where the sheer number of games gives every square owner far more chances to win than a single-game board would. A higher price just means a bigger prize pool to work with across those chances. Pick the number that fits your group and your goal, not a number borrowed from someone else's fundraiser.

You split payouts across the tournament by running ONE board for every game from the First Round through the Championship, with a fixed prize for each game within a round that increases as the rounds go on. One collection, one number assignment, done once before the First Round tips off, and every one of the tournament's games pays out against that same board. There is no need for separate boards per game or per day: the entire point of the format is that a single board covers the whole tournament.

Every game within the same round pays the identical amount, and that amount goes up round over round as the field narrows and fewer games remain. The First Round has 32 games, so each one pays a modest amount; the Championship is a single game, so it pays the most. Early rounds typically pay on the final score only. As the tournament progresses, many hosts add a halftime score on top of the final score, and the latest rounds often add a reverse-digit version of each, though reverse payouts are usually much smaller than the true-score payouts since they are more of a bonus longshot than the main prize.

Here's a tangible example on a board charging $25 a square with half kept for the cause, leaving a $1,250 prize pool to spread across the tournament:

Add up the round totals and they come to exactly $1,250, the full prize pool this example started with. Notice how the reverse-score payouts, once they show up in the Final Four and Championship, stay well below the true-score payouts at the same stage: a $370 Championship game pays $240 for the final score, $75 for halftime, and only $40 and $15 for the two reverse scores. Scale every number up or down to match your own square price and cause split; the shape of the structure, small and final-score-only early, bigger and multi-scored late, stays the same.

Notice what this structure actually does: it gives every square owner a reason to care about every single game of the tournament, not just the games their favorite team plays in, because any game could hit their number. The prize money is still weighted toward the marquee later rounds, but nothing about the first weekend gets ignored.

Whatever exact numbers you land on, agree on the full structure before the First Round tips off, write it down somewhere every participant can see, and don't change it once squares are sold. If a six-round structure with added halftime and reverse scoring feels like more than you want to manage for a first fundraiser, a simpler version pays on the final score only, every round, and still uses the same one-board, increasing-prize idea.

You collect money for a squares fundraiser by keeping one central, up-to-date record of who has paid. Chasing people down after squares are already claimed is where most fundraisers run into trouble, so update that record the moment each payment comes in. A digital system, whether that's a dedicated squares platform like Play Squares or just a shared payment app, keeps that record automatically instead of relying on you to update a paper log by hand.

The one habit worth adopting regardless of method: track that a person's payment covers the number of squares they claimed, not which specific square number they own. Squares can still shift between participants right up until numbers are assigned, so tying a payment record to an exact square position just creates a mismatch to untangle later. A simple count per person, kept in one place you update as payments arrive, is enough.

Digital payment apps make this easier since they timestamp every transaction automatically, which is especially useful if you plan to seek a corporate donation match later, as most matching programs want documentation of who gave what. A paper ledger or a cash box still works for a small, informal group, but treat it as the fallback rather than the default: the moment more than a handful of people are involved, a central digital record saves you from reconciling a stack of cash and handwritten notes after the fact.

Whichever method you use, name one person as the actual owner of that central record, even if several people are helping sell squares. It's tempting to let anyone who sells a square jot it down wherever is convenient, but that's exactly how a fundraiser ends up with two different counts of who paid. One owner, one running total, updated the same day money comes in, solves nearly every dispute before it starts.

On the compliance side, the rules genuinely do vary by state and by how formal your fundraiser is. A small pool among coworkers raising money for a colleague's medical bills carries very different considerations than a squares board run publicly on behalf of a registered nonprofit with corporate matching involved. If you're raising money on behalf of an established charity, loop in that organization before you launch the board, since they may have their own rules about how the money needs to be collected and reported.