Fundraisers & Schools?

My kids' school do not sell anything.
Like Stephanie H. said, their school has a fun run every year.
Each child in the student body, donates money. Whatever amount they can. Even if that is $1.
AND they also get, corporate Sponsors.
They have a set 'goal' every year. So everyone strives to meet that.
AND they exceed that goal, every year.
Only 1 fundraiser each year, and it is totally, successful.
The kids and parents like it.
NO selling anything.
Easy.
Effective.

My kids school sells wrapping paper for one of their fundraisers. High quality and a product that everyone needs and uses. Innisbrook is the company they use.

The meal fundraisers are successful. School night dinner sales, especially during other school events, are the most successful here.I'd love if my PTO offered babysitting for 18 mos to 10/12 yrs as a fundraiser.

My children do not sell anything except GS cookies and BS popcorn. If something came home from school I wrote the PTA a check and returned their fundraising envelope, usually unopened.

One of the best fund raisers my son's school does is a Track-a-thon. Each child gets donations for however many laps they walk/run or a flat donation. If the child brings in more than $20 they get a t-shirt and a special prize goes to the child who brings in the most. The class that brings the most gets healthy snacks brought in for a week. The children do their laps during their scheduled p.e. time.

I dont like things you order from a brochure and wait 6 weeks to recieve. I'd prefer something I can buy with the singles in my purse, like the $1.00 candy bars. Your soap thing sounds cool, if it were in the $5 range and I could buy it and be done with my transaction. I sometimes buy the coupon book or discount restraunt cards. Kids have them in hand and go business to business to sell them. No fuss, quick and easy.

I HATE the fundraisers. My son's school does not allow door to door sales and I am fine with that. This year, they did the Entertainment Books. So, 76% of the school is on free or reduced lunch and they expect them to sell $25 books? Yeah, clearly most of the parents have tons of money sitting around. And then they offer the crappy prizes for how many books each child sold. We bought 1 book and they 2 relatives bought one each. SO, my son comes home with 2 prizes...when I ask him what he got them for, he says that it was for those books that HE sold. Seriously! I really don't want to recognize kids when they don't even do the work. What 5-year old really can sell books either? I would much rather give a donation and have 100% of the profits go to the school and be DONE!

My girls' school only does a silent auction during the Fall Festival as a fundraiser... nothing else during the year... although all the families are required at the beginning of the year to put in $20... this goes directly to FPAC (our charter school's version of the PTO) and FPAC uses it for the school.

I've done a lipstick/lipgloss fundraiser with school groups... that has usually done well in the past.

the one I like best is the fun run. nothing to actually SELL.
$ per lap. They run on a 1/16th of a mile track. Most kids run around 30 laps in the alloted time.
They also do otis spunkmeyer cookie dough.

Our school has a candy cart every Friday. The kids go to school with a dollar and can get one piece of candy from the cart.

Also they set up a website with http://www.teacherwishlist.com where parents can give monetary donations to any teacher they want. The teacher puts on their wishlist what they are hoping to purchase for the classroom. Parents usually give more when they see what/who the money is going to.

They do fundraisers around here too, the door to door selling kind. The items actually look pretty nice and are fairly cheap. But most people don't do them and so I don't know how much it actually makes for the school.

I'm with Tracey K, I like the $1 sale items and I think the people my daughter is selling to would prefer that too. Not to mention I would be more open helping the by selling at work vs taking a catalog of over priced items (which I don't do, because I know they don't want to buy them).

My one daughter at her school sold entertainment books this year. Which was ok I guess, but I couldn't help but think if my other daughter was in the school too how that would help the school being that my daughters would have to sell to the same people and people only want one book.

I and MANY parents I've talked to DESPISE fundaisers that put my child in a sales position. Whatever you do, please choose something that does not require my child to sell something to "earn prizes" or wastes my child's invaluable classtime.

I love the idea of carnivals, ice cream socials, pizza parties, and other INVOLVED activities. I hate the catalogs and candies and discount cards.

Or, best of all, just ask parents if they'd like to opt out of ALL that stuff and write a check! That way, the PTO gets 100% of the proceeds!

Good luck!

Our PTA had huge success last year selling coupon books geared to our town. The company that makes the Entertainment brand coupon books provides these but they are not the massive, thick Entertainment books you may know -- these are small folders with maybe 20 coupons plus options to get online coupons -- all local businesses, restaurants, hair places, free entry to the local rec center, etc. I buy a couple just for us, they are so useful.

Another option is selling "scrip" -- gift cards to businesses. For instance, you buy a $100 card for Safeway and use it, spending all $100, but the school gets X percent. Our dance school sells scrip cards for fundraising and did very well with it last year too.

These things are both much preferable, to me, to mere stuff like wrapping paper, hand cream, candy, and other junk. They certainly are not the $1.00 items others mentioned but are $20 for the coupon books and anywhere from $10 to $100 for the scrip cards, but they are far more useful.

You can sell scrip cardsto folks if they realize that they're going to buy groceries or gasoline or go to Starbucks anyway, so why not pay when they're at those places using a card that got the school anywhere from 3 percent to 12 percent of its face value? Also, I know a lot of families buy heaps of the cards as Christmas gifts for family, the piano or karate teacher, the classroom teacher, the lawn guy, whoever gets a little remembrance at the holidays.

With a 13 and 11 yr old I feel like I have been through it all!

The elementary school has done:
- wrapping paper/giftware
- cookie dough
- fun run
- fall festival and silent auction
- selling bricks for walkways
- raffles
- book sales
- box tops
- soup labels

The middle school has done:
- box tops
- family portraits (local photographer gives large % of proceeds back to school)
- poinsettias @ christmas (had the option to buy and donate to local nursing homes)
- selling 1st aid kits
- book sales

Some of our local business partners, i.e. restaurants or fast food chains, have designated school nights and a portioned of total sales goes back to school.

My take on it is that the school gets no more than 50% of the proceeds. I would prefer to donate $100+ directly to the school (and we do) rather than have $200 in wrapping paper and cookie dough.

Personally, I'd rather the school either have a donation that goes straight to the school or something really useful. There's only so much overpriced wrapping paper I want to buy and if all the local schools sell it, then I'm swamped by all the kids, nieces, etc. Be different.

A lot of companies have fundraisers - Avon, Mabel's Labels, Scholastic Book Fairs. The benefit of some of them is that it's all online. My SD would loose the forms every year so I quit buying because I'd have to cancel checks. Anything you can ALSO offer online is a good thing, IMO.

We've also done the candy thing and will often buy from SD when she does that because it's immediate.

We have a fitness challenge fundraiser and a spelling bee fundraiser which brings in tons of money and what's nice is that 100% of the donations go to the school. For the spellng bee one, kids are given a list of words to learn in advance and of course the lists are grade appropriate then envelopes are sent home so the parents/grandparents/etc can sponser the child, $ for how many words that they get correct. The tests are collected and sent home so the parents put the appropriate funds in the designated envelope and send it back to school. You can do flat donation, too. It's great incentive for the kids and the parents are willing to open their wallets because it's educational. Also, we make the principal take a spelling test, too!