Butter Braids are an AWESOME product!! And they have their own local distrubitors, which is helpfull. I am trying to sell my own PTO on this fundraiser, but you know it is sometimes hard to break old habits. Another fundraiser that I looked into as well is Entertainment books. Especially if you live in a "big" city. Good luck.
We used QSP last fall and had to purchase our items by the case. So, we then had to rent a couple freezers to store the extra and the stuff that wasn't picked up.
This spring we went with The Cookie Dough Man, a local company and it's so much better. If one butter braid is ordered, then that's all we have to worry about--not an entire case. They came to the school and did all the distribution. We didn't have to do anything but send home the flyers & collect money. Then the stuff that isn't picked up (they were at our school 2:30-6) they took back to their warehouse and those parents contacted them for pick-up arrangements. Also, one of the other pluses for this company... if a parent sells 40 boxes (any combination of merchandise)at their office, the company delivers it straight to the parent's office. I think that is so great!!
Anyway, I would suggest checking into as many companies as possible and see who works best for your school.
Do you have problems with parents not picking up the cookie dough and then having to find some place to store it?
It seems to me that this is a great fundraiser, but the parents at our school have been less than enthusiastic about doing the cookie dough because of the storage issue. Maybe this just isn't the right fundraiser for our school? :confused:
We do the cookie dough in the fall. That is our only big fund raiser in the fall and makes the majority of our budget. We typically do $15000 with the cookie dough in the fall. We kick it off the first week of school to get a head start on the other schools. I was told that we can't do a big spring fundraiser because the parents and such can't support it because of the diverse economic population we have at our school. So, our carnival/silent auction tends to be the 2nd one of the year.
Well, this year our principal needed more money for things than his budget accomodated and more than we could give, so he did the cookie dough as a school fundraiser (not PTA) and he did about $11,000! I was in shock!
I'm hoping we can do both next year since that "thought" of not being able to have a successful spring fundraiser was proven wrong! We did this fundraiser less than 6 weeks before school ends for us!
So, I say try it in the fall for sure then reevaluate it and see if you want to try it in the spring and see what happens.
We always do cookie dough in the fall as a tag-along to our big "catalog" fundraiser. It has been a HUGE seller here. People love, love, love the cookie dough!
This year we're using Joe Corbi's, and adding the pizzas. I plan to stock my own freezer... their pizza is awesome.
Anyway, cookie dough is great in the fall... think Thanksgiving, Christmas cookies, those crisp days when people want to bake something... I wouldn't try it in the spring, myself!
Our school used Otis Spunkmeyer cookie dough (not sure which company they went through but some school districts already make these cookies at the school so you could use your supplier and just mark them up, but it worked VERY well. We just checked off the flavors we wanted (for tubs OR cases) and paid and then they announced two days that we could pick them up and they just kept them in the school's freezer. They said it went very well.
