I had a local florist tell me that she had been to different schools for this. She paid a fee for the booth plus something like 10 or 20% of her profits were given to the school. She said she loved those events. She made money, the school made money, and it was good advertising.

Nonsequitur...Your craft fair sounds like a nice idea. Once you establish something and do it well people will always come back again. Its worth looking into. Thanks for the info!

Workingmom....Email me and I will forward you the information. It really comes down to doing it yourself and making the money or letting someone else handle it for you and making peanuts.

I do know that orientaltrading.com has a great policy for fundraisers. You tell them the date of your event and then you have 30 days after that to return unopened items.

I realize they don't have tons of gift items for adults, but stocking stuffers and decorations are very inexpensive. Plus if you wanted to do crafts, they have a ton of great christmas stuff. (If you get any foam crafts, get the special foam glue; regular glue doesn't work.) Look in the toys and the holiday sections of their site.

If you like the craft fair idea but don't know where to get the vendors, put ads in your school newsletter and stop at a couple craft fairs.

I just discovered this site and feel like i've struck gold! I'm the vp of our pto for the coming year and this is my second year chairing the santa shop fundraiser. The last 6 years, we had volunteers buy the stuff, we inventoried, stored it, set it up, hoped it sold, and made money. This year i'm checking into santa shops like i've read about in the forums. Problem is, they definitely make the majority of the profit for themselves and leave a small amount for the fundraising group. I know we would make much more $$ buying the stuff ourselves but it's a lot of work. So I'm debating this decision and would appreciate any input.

We charge a small amount for table space and crafters set up for two days. We don't let dealers like Pampered Chef in unless they are selling gift baskets and related crafts only.

Each vendor must have 50 items priced at 25 cents.

We set up in the gym. Check out is on the stage and there's free wrapping by the sixth graders on the way out.

Each vender has a coded bucket and at check out we take the tag with the price and their code. The code is made of letters so the price isn't confused. The school gets 10% of sales and we tally up how much each booth is owed from the cashier.

We do in on the first Friday of December. They set up Thursday night. There is always someone there so the crafters just come in periodically to restock. On Friday the students come through as classes. It is open to the public and parents on Friday 8am-8pm and on Saturday 8am-4pm. We only need to have two cashiers at any given time.

The PTSA has a bake sale table in the gym too. We use soda vendor boxes (The ones with very small sides) for the shoppers the carry and a local supermarket donates bags for check out.

It is really fun and since we do it every year the turn out for both crafters and shoppers is great.