We have the prizes at the booths. Three different levels and we give them out by how well they do at the game. Our kids who attend our school festival are allowed to do all the games "free" of charge and then the parents or siblings who don't attend, have to buy tickets. The reason for this is that we have to have a free event with our fundraiser events that we do for the school. We get a student listing from our office and when the kids come in, we mark their names off and stamp their hands with a specific stamp to show they are "free" kids to do the events. We also sell tickets at a pre-sale basis two weeks before the event at a cheaper price. Then we sell additinal tickets the day of the festival. It has worked out great!
All food and balloon, face painting, etc, is at a low cost to everyone.
We normally give everyone 1 token just for playing, regardless if they win or not. If they win we'll give them another token...so they have the possibility to get 2 tokens per game.
We mark the tokens because we use basic poker chips and kids will come in with poker chips from outside to use. This way we know the legit ones.
Thanks melloweer. Please, Tell me more about the marked tokens. Do you limit the number they can get at each game.
Really the only problem we would have with not being able to have tickets is for the outside organizations that sponsor some games. They supply the supplies for the games plus run it and we give them $.20 for every ticket them collect. I'll need to brainstorm for some alternatives for this.
We also do a reward center/redemption center, but we use marked tokens. The kids still buy tickets to play the games even though we don't count them. The week before the carnival we presell tickets at a cheaper prize then the day of, and also sell wristbands for $20.00 each which are only sold presell. As far as using the wristbands and counting tickets you could have parents keep a tally. It might not be 100% accurate but you'd have some idea.
We've had several requests from parents to come up with some idea to pay 1 price and play unlimited games at the carnival?
Just wondering if anyone has any experience with this?
Some facts about our carnival.
We sell tickets and they are collected at each game, we count them afterwards to know how popular each game was (although this is not super important). At the games, players are given reward tickets to be turned in at the "Reward Center" for prizes. We also have "outside" organizations (Band Boosters, high schools sports teams, high school classes) who "host" games for us and we give them a percentage of the tickets collected for their games. Our prizes are provided by the company we do our yearly fundraiser with.
