This is one of those days where I’m asking for your eyes and ears and experience. One of the many benefits of blogging is being able to reach out and ask for the opinions and input of people who we have something in common with. And whether you have kids or remember being one yourself, you might be able to help.
 |
| pencil pouch post here |
I am serving as a co-chair of the Fundraising Committee for my daughter’s preschool. K will be “graduating” and going on to Kindergarten in the Fall, but then M will be stepping into preschool, so I’ll still be helping in some way.
One of the tasks at hand is planning for fundraising next year. Because it’s a co-op that aims to keep tuition low for everyone, fundraising plays a huge part in the school’s budget. We have a few fundraisers we know we want to continue, but I know there are a million other ideas out there. I’d love to hear what you’ve experienced– fundraisers that are fun, actually raise a few dollars and will appeal to our community-minded parents. Not necessarily catalog or affiliate sales, unless you’ve got one to recommend that’s really amazing, but events or ideas that are all-around wins.
I hesitate to post this because of all of the spam potential, but I know we have some clever readers with excellent taste, and I’d really like to hear your suggestions. If it becomes spam-ville, I’ll close the comments. (And if I get some great ideas, I’ll happily put them together in a post to share!)
You guys always have great ideas. I’m guessing this will be no exception!
How big is the preschool? Our smaller preschoool will do easy little things throughout the year, like take pictures with Santa or while infield trips, and them sell them in a cute paper frame to parents for $5. So if I am unable to make a field trip I still get a cute picture of my kiddo!
They also do a pancake breakfast with Santa Claus before Christmas break.
My older kids have both attended schools (in two different states) that put I. A HUGE neighborhood carnival. It is a LOT of work, but the only fund raiser they do all year. They ask local shops for silent auction items, have a craft fair for local vendors, and games for the kids. Just in snacks alone they do really well.
Um, I hesitate to suggest this because so many people have problems with pageants but it was a really big fundraiser for the cheerleaders at the local high school.
I live in Kansas and trash bags are actually a big seller. Timing is everything in selling these and they must be a great quality. I know of schools that make a 1,000 dollars off of the sales.
So, totally different than preschool but the teenage girls at church recently had an auction fundraiser for camp. People at church donated their services (such as guitar lessons, voice lessons, waterskiing lessons, converting pictures to dvds, etc) and baked goods and we bid on the items. It was pretty fun and I think they raised more money than they expected.
A local charter school puts on a half marathon and 5K run each year. It’s a huge event (with good sponsors), but it’s sells out each year. I think it has become their only fundraiser because it is always so successful.
Our church’s children’s program sells coupon books each year. They purchase them halfway through the year from the coupon book company at a very discounted rate and then sell them for half off the regular price (I always buy one each year). Not sure what their numbers are, but they’ve continued it for four years now.
Our elementary school does a Family Movie Night several times a year. It’s a most low-income school so we try and keep all of our fundraisers low-cost. We show the movie in the gym of the school and admission is free. We have inexpensive concessions and make our money off of that. A family can have an inexpensive evening and support their school at the same time.
A good way to raise some money and help the community is to have a trashathon. The parent/child duo get sponsors who donate based on per pound that the child collects or a one lump sum. Then when the day comes for the trashathon the whole group goes to a certain road or area and collect trash, which is weighed at the end of the day and then the sponsors are informed.
Something our church did to raise money for our youth program is to have an Auction where people donate used stuff (such as home goods, furniture, etc. – NO JUNK) and we had a silent auction for it. We also accepted homemade goods (blankets, baby stuff, hair bows, etc.) that were also sold in a silent auction. We would set all this stuff up in one half of our gymnasium and in the other half off we had a bake sale/cake auction. Fun stuff!! It working obviously depends on a lot of factors. Good luck!
Lil O’s school sold Snack Taxis for two years and made about $300-400 a year from them. Plus, they were great for kids to have for their snacks and lunches.
They also did one PJ Party night a season and charged $25/kid for 3 hours. Parents could also drop off a child (even siblings and pay extra). The kids did crafts, had a snack, played and watched a movie. Each PJ party brought in several hundred dollars. The parents enjoyed a night out. They usually scheduled them before the holidays (so parents could shop without the kids around), around Valentine’s Day, etc….
I once lived in a place where a local favorite pizza shop allowed discounted vouchers to be sold for fundraising events. Those were FABULOUS because everybody loved their pizza (not a chain) and those vouchers were great to have on hand!
I’ve also had great success with asking local artists to donate for an auction and/or musical performance. A musical performance is great fun. Silent auctions are also a blast. We had a pilot who donated two trips in his small airplane, another person who donated a game’s worth of their season tickets to a favorite sports team/event, a chef who offered a catered dinner, etc.
A craft fair is also fun. You could do a few crafts in bulk with a few people for a few nights and have a stash to sell.
Bake sales = yum; combine them w/a fundraiser concert and you’re good.
I’ve known a pancake breakfast to raise quite a bit. The ingredients are cheap and the community and fun levels are high. You’d need access to an industrial kitchen though.
The trashathon idea above sounds fabulous!
I’ve also had fun participating in a bike-a-thon similar to the 5K run mentioned above.
A local organization raises a lot of money year with a 5K walk/run, another does well with a soda can donation if you have a deposit in your state.
Our Pre-school does auctions, where donations from local businesses (gift cards, lessons, items) and handmade things from each class are auctioned off. Also, some parents donate handmade things, too. One year I offered to make a custom T-shirt quilt for the highest bidder (T-shirts provided by bidder and the other supplies by me.). This brought in 200$ for the school.
Also, in our schools Little Cesears Pizza kits are always the biggest hit.
Good luck.
One of my favorite fundraisers that my neighbor’s private school does is all about apples. They sell local apples for $1 a pound, as well as apple cider and apple bread (or something.) I LOVED that fundraiser, because I WILL be buying apples anyway, so I’m happy to buy them from her. Of course, this is a fall fundraiser, and if you could hook up with a local apple grower, you might be able to make quite a bit!
I’m organising a charity sock monkey workshop next week – people pay £10 to come, bring a pair of socks, it’s being held in a local cake shop so they can buy their own drinks/cake, and all I will do it come along and teach them how to make their socks into monkeys. I’ll have a handful of fellow sewing friends, and we will do the sewing machine bit for people, and guide them through the rest. Small scale, but fun and popular and the kind of thing you could repeat and get others to host in their own homes…?
…so basically 100% profit to the charity – more over on my blog, and happy to share my instruction sheet, too if you want it
Variety shows/ talent shows are great fundraisers. You have individual families, or children, or staff etc perform various talents. Have donations or a fee at the door. and Sell handmade food and desserts during the show.(everyone likes to eat during the show) all that can be profit, free entertainment and a chance for families to be out and share their skills. Sometimes local businesses will donate food or prizes as a way of contributing (and marketing their products) this can be as big or small as your community wants it to be.
Our tball league has each team make a basket with a theme. Like “movie night” or “backyard bbq” or “kids outdoor toys” The team mom collects new items from each kid and arranges them all in a basket, or cooler, or popcorn bucket. They have an auction where people buy tickets for $1. Each basket is displayed with a jar and you can put your tickets in any of the jars. They draw a ticket as the winner of that basket.
A fundraiser that my kid’s school does through out the year is a Dine Out night. A local restaurant donates 10% of the evening profits to the school. It is a different restaurant each month. It raising good money and it is a great way to build community at the school.
The co-op preschool that Lil’ Miss went to does a play put on by the parents – they charge like $3 a ticket and get them sold all over time. At the same time, they sell simple concessions, like bags of pretzels and string cheese and they have an open house and a little carnival thing with some games – bean bag toss. They also get tons of stuff donated from parents and local stores to have raffle baskets- I think there were 10 last year!
It can be really profitable if the parents are into it- even with spreading tickets around town, the parents have to be really proactive about spreading the word. Also, getting the parents to get really into the play can be challenging.
Another idea that would be a lot easier on everyone (IMO) would be a silent auction. You could have a fancy dinner – get food donated or just charge say $20/plate- that’s not outrageous if it’s a fancy dinner and for a good cause. Then get things donated from parents and the community to auction off.
The parents in our co-op were really varied, so when donations were asked for, there was a lot of variety and really interesting things!
We also did all the things like restaurants that donate some of the proceeds, and plant sales, etc….
Hope that helps!!
What about a tuition raffle? We do it at out school every year and there is very little overhead. Our tickets go for $25, but the tuition is $7,500 a year. Most everyone will buy a ticket for $25 in hopes of getting their tuition paid for the year. We’ve also done baskets at an annual spring fling. Every class has to produce a basket with a different theme. The students bring in items for the baskets or they each send in $5. These are auctioned at the spring fling. They’ve also done BBQ plates to sell. Those have been wildly successful.
I work in fundraising and the organization that I work for does two major fundraisers each year, a 5K run/walk and a golf outing with a silent auction at dinner. They take a bit of coordination, especially the first few years to get them off the ground, but are extremely successful.
We send our children to a Christian school so we have a committee that organizes the fundraising (for extra things, not the tuition.) We’ve made apple pies (pre-sell, this is a great fundraiser for us), fair and auction, selling gift certificates/cards to local places (they buy them for less and sell them for face value), a meat fundraiser, a plant sale in the spring, recycling (in Canada there is a group called Terracycle that pays you for your garbage – we’ve done quite well with this), as well as recycling laptops, cell phones, digital cameras etc. There are different groups out there who do this for non-profit groups. In September our school also sells Entertainment books and we make a good profit on that too. Please excuse my lack of sentence structure, I’m trying to type fast. Have fun!
Our school does a silent auction with items and servises donated by families and local businesses. We also do movie nights in the school courtyard. Quite a few local restraunts partner with schools to have family fundraising nights. Go there to eat and say you are from the school and they will donate a portion of the ticket to the school. At preschool the kids create artwork that is then put on plates and sold to the parents. All kids do the art and the parents decide if they want to buy.
Small art canvases painted by the kids then sold to parents/grandparents at about $10 a pop have worked well for our childcare centre. You can have an art exhibition night if you like and sell drinks to raise more and make it a social event, or simply display the canvases at the preschool and collect the money when parents take them home :)
Our school does a fall and winter fundraiser called Charitymania ( details can be found at charitymania.com) Tickets are around 20 dollars and each family is asked to try and sell 2. Tickets are connected to football games in fall and basketball games in the winter. There are weekly cash prizes. I think its easier selling two higher priced tickets than many smaller items such as candy, nuts, and wrapping paper. Also, because it’s linked to sports, the dads tend to get more involved in the fundraising.
Good Luck! Mel
This year my daughter’s Kindergarten Center did a read a thon. We held it in conjunction with the 100th day of school. Each child had a goal of reading 100 minutes. And they collected pledges. It went over really quite well. The kidos were learning and we raised a good amount for the school. It was also nice to not have the focus selling to earn a prize.
My neighbor earned money for a school trip by putting together summer activity kits for kids. She bought crafts from the Oriental Trading company, I think, but other places would be great. There were three crafts for each month of the summer break. My son loved them. We ended up ordering another in the fall.
There’s been a thread recently on the Spoonflower flikr forum on precisely thjs topic. A SF designer had a drawing printed from her son’s k-garten class and made a blanket frommit. She also offered her services for a couple of custom designs. They auctioned for a fair chunk of change. I think the idea of offering to create something unique for someone (even if it’s just adding a name to an existing design) can really get people excited. As crafters/artists, we tend to forget that not everyone looks at the world through “I-can-do-that-myself” glasses
our preschool did a silent auction as part of the Christmas concert and it was a big success, allowing them to buy a new vacuum, water cooler, and some play equipment. They got donations from local businesses and did baskets, and that included a few baskets with handmade items, including some stuff from my own self! Which my sister in law won, which I thought was kind of hilarious.
it would probably be helpful to detail that a bit…. it wasn’t your typical silent auction, it was actually like a draw really. You could buy tickets and you put your tickets in whatever envelopes you wanted to try win. The downside to it was that it was past kids’ bedtimes and there was one basket that every little girl wanted and one basket that every little boy wanted, so of course many little preschoolers up past their bedtimes were quite tearful when they didn’t win, mine included. Two hours past bedtime is a crappy time to learn life lessons about how we can’t always win!
For a good affiliate type fundraiser you could try Mabel’s Labels. Their products are fantastic! I love them.
My daughters elementary school does not do sales fundraisers. They just ask for money, lol!
A Bingo night is a fun family night and fundraiser too. Combine it with a hot dog dinner, bake sale, and/or silent auction. We did that at my girls’ school and it was a hit – became a tradition and got bigger each year.
I’m a bit late reading this but here’s a unique one. Our local minor league baseball team has organizations sign up to work various concession stands at their games, and then that organization gets 10% of the proceeds from that stand. It has helped our choir earn a nice chunk of money and I understand there are quite a few ball teams that do this. Best of luck to you!
My nieces were part of a good deedathon for their school. Friends and family pledge $x a deed for kids to perform up to some maximum. So sweet and no crappy candy involved.