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 people raising money for a charity or a cause reach for it most often, and plenty of workplaces run one every March as well, while schools and community groups come to it a little less frequently. What all of them get out of it is the same thing: a board that costs almost nothing to set up and that somebody who has never watched a college basketball game can still follow.

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.

Everything in this guide works whether you run the board on paper or set it up digitally with Play Squares, though three weeks is a long time to be the only person who knows what the grid says. On an online board the grid updates while a game is still being played and highlights the square on track to take that prize if the score holds, so a hundred supporters can check for themselves instead of texting you during the Sweet Sixteen. Our March Madness squares page covers that version, including automatic number randomizing and score tracking through every round.

A youth sports team reaches for this format because it already has a group of people who care about sports, so a squares board turns something everyone around the team already enjoys into money for travel costs and gear. Someone raising money for a charity treats the tournament as one more opportunity on the calendar to bring supporters in, and a workplace gets three weeks of something to talk about in return for a single afternoon of setup. None of them 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 travels outside March Madness. For a fundraiser built around one marquee event rather than a three-week tournament, our Super Bowl squares page covers the single-game version, and if your supporters follow football more closely than college basketball, our football squares fundraiser page sets the same thing up around an NFL game instead.

Compared to a bracket pool, where supporters have to pick winners round by round, squares removes the skill requirement entirely, which is exactly why it tends to sell faster in a mixed group: a coworker who has never watched a college basketball game holds the same chance as the office's biggest fan.

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 two last score digits, one from each team in whichever game is being settled.

Here is the one setup decision that genuinely separates a tournament board from a Super Bowl board, and most guides skip it: the tournament is played on neutral courts, so there is no home team to put along the top. Label your axes winning team across the top and losing team down the left side instead, so that a single board resolves cleanly for all 63 games no matter who is playing. Labelling them by seed, better seed along the top and lower seed down the side, works too and some groups prefer it, but pick one before you sell a square and print it on the board, because switching halfway through the tournament changes who wins.

At the end of a scoring period, which in basketball means 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. A game that goes to overtime settles on the official final score with the overtime included, not on the score at the end of regulation, and college basketball sends enough tournament games to an extra five minutes every March that this is worth stating on the board rather than deciding on the night. Say the same about a square that wins twice across 63 games, which on a board this long is close to inevitable: the simplest answer, and what most pools do, is to let it happen and pay that square twice.

The numbers should only be randomized after every square is sold and paid for. Doing it earlier shuts out anyone who has not joined yet, and it breaks the single thing that makes the board fair, which is that every square was claimed while its digits were still unknown. Nobody ever picks their own numbers here, and claiming a square first buys no advantage at all. Once the digits are drawn the board locks: no new entries, no swaps, no changed claims. 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 in the next section.

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 is also why squares suits the tournament so well as a fundraiser: nobody gets eliminated from the squares pool the way a team gets eliminated from the bracket, so a supporter who claimed one box in February still has a live rooting interest in the Championship three weeks later.

Pick a price that keeps your group engaged, fills the board, and gets you to your fundraising goal. A few concrete starting points worth considering are $5, $10, $25, or $50 a square, but treat those as options rather than a going rate: the right number for your group comes out of your own goal and your own audience, not out of 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, and watch the divisor here, because it is the number most fundraisers get wrong. Your goal is almost always the amount you want the cause to end up with, not the amount you want to collect, and on the common half-for-the-cause split you have to collect twice your goal to get there. So on a 100-square board you divide the goal by 50, not by 100. A team that wants $1,500 for the season needs $3,000 through the board, which is $30 a square. Dividing by 100 would have priced it at $15 and landed the season half short. If your split is not 50/50, adjust the divisor to match: keeping 70 percent for the cause means dividing the goal by 70.

Then sanity-check that price against the actual room. A bigger group can generally carry a higher price, since each person only needs a square or two to fill the board and there is more total budget in play, while a smaller group needs each person to claim several squares and a gentler price gives them room to do it. Supporters buying more than one square is normal and worth encouraging, since someone who wants to give more can simply claim three boxes instead of one without changing what anyone else pays. Balance the two things against each other rather than maximizing one: a higher price raises more once the board fills, but a board that never fills raises nothing at all.

Here is how the numbers scale at three illustrative price points, assuming you keep half for the cause and pay the other half out in prizes.

The 50/50 split above is one example, not a rule: keeping 70 percent treats the prizes as a thank-you for playing, keeping 30 percent leans on a bigger prize pool to sell the board faster. Whichever you choose, decide it before you sell a single square and put it in writing wherever you announce the fundraiser.

One thing is genuinely different about a tournament board, and it is worth weighing when you set the price: a supporter is buying 63 games and three weeks of chances rather than one afternoon, which is why a March Madness board usually justifies a higher price per square than a single-game board would. Treat that as reasoning rather than a rule, and pick the number that fits your group and your goal, not one 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 apply the reverse score rule to each of those, paying whoever holds the same two digits the other way round. Those reverse prizes normally sit well below the straight ones at the same stage, since they work as a bonus alongside the main prize rather than in place of it.

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.

Whatever numbers you land on, agree the whole structure before the First Round tips off, write it somewhere every participant can see, and leave it alone once squares are sold. If six rounds of halftime and reverse prizes is more than you want to manage on a first attempt, pay on the final score only in every round and keep the same one-board, increasing-prize shape.

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 timestamp every transaction automatically, which matters if you plan to seek a corporate donation match later, since most matching programs want documentation of who gave what. A paper ledger still works for a small, informal group, but treat it as the fallback rather than the default.

Whichever method you use, name one person as the owner of that record even when several people are selling squares. Letting everyone jot sales down wherever is convenient is exactly how a fundraiser ends up with two different counts of who paid.

On the compliance side, the rules genuinely vary by state and by how formal the fundraiser is, so check what your own state allows before you collect anything. A small pool among coworkers supporting a colleague's medical bills sits somewhere very different than a board run publicly for a registered nonprofit with corporate matching involved. If you are raising money on behalf of an established charity, loop that organization in before you launch, since they may have their own rules about how money gets collected and reported.