We just finished our annual carnival and we brought in over 20K after expenses. We only spent about $5,000 on everything. We had a petting zoo, pony rides, 4 bounce house's, slides, maze, hay ride, dunking booth, and a lot more booths.

What we do is we have each teacher pick out a booth. Then it is up to those teachers and room parents to man the booth during the carnival. Our carnival is from 3 in the afternoon to 7 pm. Most parents will sign up for about 30 min each time.

To get the prizes and concession goods we ask local companies for there support. We also have an ice cream party contest between each grade level on who can bring in the most candy, soda bottles, and prizes. We talked to our local newspaper and they run an ad for us for 4 weeks and we put there subscription information on the back of all our flyers we send home with the students, so we are saving money on advertising. We also give each student that brings a cake for the cake walk on the day of the event 2 tickets for each item.

Some of our booths we have make over $1000. Our cake walk brought in $1400, the soda bottle ring toss made over $1200. We spread out the soda bottles to make it a little more difficult. We start planning our carnival in august and we have it the 3 sat. of October. Our carnival committee is set up with a carnival coordinator, a game coordinator, concession coordinator, prize coordinator, and under writing/donations coordinator.

Most of our concession stand is hotdogs, chili cheese hotdogs, nachos, chili cheese nachos, ice cream bars, coke, diet coke, sprite, water, bags of potato chips and those big dill pickles. We didn’t over charge on anything. i.e. our drinks were one ticket (50 cents per ticket) We try to get as much as we can donated by Albertson’s, Kroger, wal-mart, and even car dealerships.(most give drinks) Now out side the concession stand we had some booths selling cotton candy, popcorn, funnel cakes, and snow cones. Every year we buy one machine to help us from renting one. We own our popcorn machine, snow cone machine, and our chili/cheese dispenser. We have bought them off e-bay. Every year again we add something to keep people coming back.

Now I don't know how big your school is but we don't have 400 students in our pre k-6th grade classes. We are a town of about 2000 people. We get the whole community involved in the carnival. We also try to get the mayor every year in our dunking booth. If you have any questions I am more then happy to help in anyway I can. Good luck.

My entire group views fundraising as this disgusting act of begging. It's really strange, our old school did it with good reputable companies and fun events. How do you change this culture and attitude? I'm a new prez and I'm sinking fast. The old prez is still around and very vocal about how we shouldn't have fundraisers...where the heck does she think all this $$ comes from?????? HELP

If anyone is buying carnival supplies, email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. If you were planning on ordering from OTC anyway, I have a free shipping and 20% off code I just got. Those don't come around too often. It expires June 29, 2004.

Well, this thread made me think too much about carnivals so I mentioned it to the board. Guess who's also doing a fall carnival.

Here's what we're planning so far:
Silent auction - funds will go to PTSA
Carnival Games - one hosted by each class with the funds going to that class.
The kindergartens will do the cake walk and Fun House because there are three classes and they need the most funding.
We will probably hold it on a Saturday.
I'm looking into asking local businesses that don't have items to donate to the auction to fund the prizes and supplies for the carnival games.

How can you make $9,000? That is a lot. We have about 500 families and raised nothing near that when did then a couple years ago - and I plan on doing one again this year as they are too fun to pass up.

What do you charge for admission? Tickets? Is each game one ticket?

Metz--YES--that answered my questions! Thank you so much! I'm sorry I didn't thank you earlier, but it's been crazy here. I can see why your catalogue sale is so successful--you actually put work into it, and promote it. Our PTAs "big" one is through Cherrydale, and the way it's run you'd think they were ashamed to have to raise money. My friends whose kids went/go to Catholic school are amazed at how fundraising is viewed in our school, because in Catholic school it's just part of the curriculum! Our principal definitely doesn't help much--she's not big on hitting people up for money -- and as my group is trying to come up with about 100 grand for our new playground (we're going the whole nine yards with accessibilty and poured in place rubber)we aren't exactly high on her favorites list!

BTW--on Friday a school in the town next to ours just cleared $9,000 for a 4 hour "Fun Fair." They had a bunch of inflatable rides sponsored by local businesses, another donated the food to sell, and they had a small Tricky Tray. A neighbor of mine's sister-in-law organized it, and I can't wait to talk to this woman!