over the past year the ink cartridge thing has done well for us. we have also added schwans which works just like escrip. these are great as they cost us absolutely nothing but a couple hours for collecting, packing and promoting. if you do not do escrip you are losing out on a big potential for minimal effort. we average $300./month which may not be alot compared to most schools but we have only 120 families and are 1 1/2 hours ride from the nearest mall. so we're pretty thrilled. good luck
HI! I revived this thread because I'm looking for the same information: What "cash for trash" programs and others work best for your school?
We are a K-5 school with over 300 families. We only participate in BoxTops and it continues to decrease in amount as all the other schools in this town are now also participating. Campbells seems to be more of a pain - relating to amount of labels collected/stored to "fruits of labor". We haven't tried cellphone or ink cartridges. Many also participate in the Target program. We are quite fortunate that we have a local bank as a sponsor. We also have membership donations, Back-to-School night Bake Sale, wrapping paper/gifts/candy/candles fundraiser, 2 Scholastic Book Fairs, Home Parties Fair and a couple pay-for-tickets family activities. "Bang for Buck": Each grade, K-5, has a grade level activity, field trip and enrichment program. We also have had an "author in residence" program that benefits all grades. Funds have also gone towards Teacher Appreciation Lunch in May and a Scholarship. I think, in retrospect, that we're pretty diverse. Any other suggestions, ideas? Like other schools, we may need to ditch some of our programs due to lack of funding and the need to support more "basic school needs"...
We went with Kathryn Beich/Nestle catalog for our 2002 Fall fundraiser. We went with them two years ago and also made $12,000. The product amount for thier catalog ranges from $5 to $40. The also have other catalogs that will sell with them. For every child that sells just one item they receive a prize. Also as the dollar amount goes up on what a child sells so does the amount of prizes. Well at least in our area of Pennsylvania that is. They also have a flower bulb catalog.
Our school has aproxmately 423 students kindergarten to 5th grade.
We also participate in the Campbells labels, Box tops for education, and the cartridges.
We have Santa's secret work shop but do not make a profit, it is soley for the children.
For Open House, we have a bake sale and chinese auction. We ask each classroom to donate a basket for the auction. Each child brought in a donation for the basket. Last year we had school supplies, christmas baskets, book baskets, lottery ticket baskets, etc. We also had gift certificates from our local restaurants too. This was a huge success. Everyone raved how great they were.
We have two scholastic book fairs one in the fall and the other in the spring. In the fall our school library benefits. They are given the profit to benefit all of the children. In the spring the children benefit. We have buy one book get one free.
I have been elected president of our PTO for the 2002 - 2003 term.
Our PTO does only school T-shirts, fall and spring fundraiser, halloween carnival we also have a membership drive brings in about $450.00 to $500.00 a year that out of 650 students. We feel that yes we have to budget for items but these cover all of our expenses. I am going to suggest that PTO look into grants to bring more programs to the school instead of relying on the above fundraisers. PTO needs to focus on bringing family together in parent involvement if PTO does that then you have the support you need to run your programs.
We used to do so many fundraisers that we lost sight of what was important, not to mention the fact that we upset most of our parents and teachers with the neverending requests. Now we just use the "no-brainers" like Box Tops, Operation Education and Target, we stopped doing Campbells because it was too much work for virtually no return.
