We usually make around $15K. We are a poverty level school of about 430+. This year I think we made $19k profit. We have games during in the day. We give each child .50 worth of tickets. At night we have the games, supper, Royalty Ceremony, and prize walk. This year we had an auction too. This is for our Fall Festival. Our King/Queen, Prince/Princess has never made under $10K since I've been there.
We presell tickets. For each 50 cent donation brought in, the child gets a ticket to the carnival. Out of 450 kids, we had over 130 bring in over $100. Our king and queen combined brought in over $800. We also have princes and princesses and give out lots of prizes during an assembly.
They get donations from Friday before the carnival until the Thursday before the carnival. We hand out the tickets on the Friday of the carnival. We give extra tickets to the teachers to hand out as they see fit, but the kids are really generous with their extra tickets.
This has worked really well for us. Each year it gets bigger and bigger. We combine our carnival with a spaghetti dinner and silent auction. All together the night nets us $20K. We usually serve 1200.
The really nice thing is that we put this together in about six weeks. Four weeks of getting donations and 2 weeks of HEAVY work. We have great support from our teachers and administration. They have come up with the cutest ideas to get the kids up for it. It would be much harder if the parents had to do it on their own.
We have the standard games. We have to have things that move our lines quickly or our halls become a mess. The past couple of years, we have been able to have a couple of games outside so that relieved the congestion.
I am not trying to be dense, just to understand what you do to sell $11,000 in presales. Do you mean that you sell something like all-admission wristbands? For how much? Please elaborate!
We have the usual games, but our success comes in preselling our tickets. We have a king/queen contest where the students get votes for every 50 cent donation they bring in. In return, they get a ticket to the carnival. We usually have sold $11K worth of tickets through this means before we have the carnival. We sell an additional $2k the night of.
The thing that drives this is the enthuasim the teachers give it. They do skits and act goofy and just play it up. Parents also know that this is the only fundraiser and after it is over, that's it. By the first weekend in October, we're done and all we have left to do is spend the money.
I think that is fantastic. Please share your games and secrets with me. We have 230 kids in a k-6 grade school.About 90% of the kids receive free lunch and we're planning a carnival for the middle of May. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Wow, 13K for just the games! That's great. Can you elaborate on the games you have? And do you do immediate prizes or a redemption booth?
We are in midatlantic suburbs and lots of the schools have the evening all-adult things. But because our school has so many young kids, many parents aren't really interested in getting a babysitter for a fundraiser at their preschool . And we also have a wide ethnic base, with a lot of Southeast Asian families some whom really don't like the alcohol part of those evening events.
So we are trying the carnival thing. Any more info would be appreciated.
