To not lose money, I think people have to realize it's a fundraiser and if each person comes in and received $20 in monies, they're not going to get reimbursed their winnings but they may receive a prize. It's for fun! I like the way my husband's company did it. I think our school was wrong for reimbursing people at the end of the night. Sometimes people forget it's for charity!!!
We did a casino night. We found quite a bit of old equipment at the school and we used or borrowed some from surrounding churches. We did hire from an entertainment company 2 professional blackjack dealers. I think we paid $150 for them but everyone really enjoyed that. We did not use real $$. We had to use chips. Some people reimbursed at end of night, some people spent everything.
My husband's Christmas party was a Monte Carlo night. They hired all professional dealers, games, etc. All monies went to charity. But, they gave everyone fake money (bills). Every $1 = $1,000. At the end of the night, everyone counted their fake $$ and it was tabulated. (someone had a laptop there) The person with most $$ rec'd the grand prize and they then had a table set up with some other prizes and the top 10 or 20 winners of the night got to pick a prize in the order from highest to lowest. It was fun! Some of the prizes were good .. hockey tickets, football tickets, some were small (free lunch, sandwich coupons).
They also had a silent auction for additional prizes.
This would be a strictly adult event....all of our other fundraisers through the year are family oriented. There was a consensus that one adult only event was needed.
Our district doesn't allow even pretend gaming as a fundraiser so I've no advice, but I'm kind of curious about how you plan to run this to include children.
Has anyone done a Casino Night Fundraiser? We are considering one for this Spring, but don't know how you insure that you don't lose money? We thought of soliciting for auction prizes that people could use their winnings to bid on, but we have another raffle later in the year that we don't want to compete with. Any ideas?
