Hi Sunny, I think we spoke about this before since we're both in FL. (I may have been signed in as backtofundraising then).
One thing I came up with new for this year was to try to get donations from elsewhere in the state that I could group together as a package, eg, hotel, restaurant and attraction certificates for another city. So I have letters out to Tampa, Orlando, the Keys, etc in hopes that even if a few of them come through I'll have a vacation package people can bid on; already we've received enough donations from one area (although no hotel yet) to make one package.
Have you thought about a calendar raffle? Last year we did this at my daughter's school which is a small one and we did it for the entire month of March. We charged $10.00/calendar and recieved restaurant donations for the month.We made 3,500.00.Everyone loved the restaurant theme and i t was all profit as the gift certificates were all donated!
Lori- Our school is on its third year so we are relatively new. Here are our fundraisers for the 2007/2008 school year:
Entertainment Book Sales (we made $13K last year) September
Square One Art (we made $7K last year) October
Gala & Silent Auction (we made $18.5K last year) March
Golf Tournament (we made $14K two years ago when this was done) September
For our Gala and Silent Auction- we held it at a local country club-charged $50 to attend ($35 was our cost for apps, dinner, dessert). We had keg beer donated and 100% of the proceeds came back to the school; we created a signature martini named for our school and 1/2 the proceeds were ours. We had 190 silent auction items and 125 attendees (adults only). We assigned each class a basket theme and they were amazing (we had 60 classes)...the rest we solicited from disney world, sea world, local restaurants, entertainment, etc. We set the value of the items at 1/3 their face value. We made over $14,000 on the auction items alone. We had a committee of 8 people who beat the streets and faxed letters around the state (we are in FL) to all of the resorts for items about 8-10 weeks prior to our event. We only had a few companies actually say no to us. We are doing a Gala again this year...but plan to drop the prices a bit and just have appetizers and desserts for $30 per ticket to increase participation (feedback was that ticket prices were too high). We hope to bring in $25k this year.
We are also applying for as many grants as we can...we have a great grants writing team.
Have never done an auction, that sounds like a good idea. We used to always go with catalogs but this past year we changed to a discount card which really eased our stress:) . The company did everything for us and they ended up giving us $8 back from every card that sold, which is awesome from what I hear, they also gave away some cool prizes. The card sold for 10 bucks and offered cool discounts on the back from around our school. We ended up raising over $15,000:eek: over two weeks. Could have been more but we didn't think we would sell that many. Kids had a blast and we will definitely order more this year. Just an idea..
We are trying a walk-a-thon this year. We hope to make a lot of money so we can get rid of the 2 annual fundraisers that we have. We are all so sick of catalog sales and want to try something new.
