This is a playbook, not a marketing page. If you are reading this because you actually want to start a chapter, here is what we did, in the order we did it.
Step one is finding a faculty advisor. Almost every school requires one for any official club, and you cannot run real fundraisers through a school account without one. The advisor does not need to be involved in day-to-day work. They mostly need to sign forms and exist on paper. A teacher who has a personal connection to cancer is usually the easiest yes. Failing that, any science or health teacher tends to be receptive once you show them what we do and who NPCF is.
Step two is the founding board. You need at least three people who actually want to do the work, not just put it on a college application. This part matters more than people admit. A chapter with five committed students will outperform a chapter with twenty casual ones every single time. Pick the people first, figure out roles second.
Step three is your first event. We strongly recommend it be small and easy to win. A bake sale with $40 of supplies that raises $200 is a much better first event than a gala with $400 of supplies that raises $50. The point of the first event is to build the habit of finishing things, not to maximize revenue. Once your team has shipped one event, the second one is much easier. The third becomes routine.
Step four is the NPCF connection. Once you have a chapter going, message us on Instagram and we will introduce you to NPCF and help you set up your own team page on give.nationalpcf.org. From that point you can start routing money through the same pipeline we use, and your raised totals get aggregated into the national chapter total. You stop being a club and start being part of a research funding network.
The whole thing takes a few weeks if you move on it. The hardest part is starting. The second hardest part is being honest about whether the people on your founding board actually want to be there. Once those two are solved, the rest is mostly logistics.