If your art teacher is looking for a great fundraiser that includes all students' artwork - consider Fund Gatherings. FG will work with schools to gather a self-portrait (or other type of drawing) from each and every student, and all drawings are combined into a common work of art and screen printed onto a cotton tea towel or pillow case. The parents and kids love this fundraiser and it's a great way to capture the school year. The toll free number is 866 526 9997. This makes a great fundraiser for Mother's Day (granparents love the tea towels!).

The students created their artwork during Art class and started them at the end of September. Most only took the one class to finish them but some stayed in from recess (students choice, not the teachers demand)to finish theirs if they didn't have enough time in class.

The Art teacher kept all the artwork and seperated them by classroom. If there were parents who were not able to make it to McDonalds, they just came to school when they could to view it. Some brought digital cameras and took pics and emailed the pics to other family members.

We created order forms that were sent home or given to the parent when they viewed the artwork. There were many parents who ordered a lot but never saw their childs artwork, they wanted to be surprised.

In September, we sent a letter home to parents telling them about this project so they were aware that it was being done during Art class.

You can have the artwork at PTO meetings to view or any school event that you're hosting in October. Or even Parent Teacher Conferences????

I'm not sure how other companies work, but with KidsKards, this project was so simple, it was only myself and the ArtTeacher that did it. don't get me wrong, we had parents come and try to help but there was nothing for them to do LOL????? I did have one parents count $$ to make sure it matched what they ordered on their order form but that was about it.

KidsKards gives you an excel spreadsheet that you download and input all the artwork info on and if anything took long, that was it and I did in within an hour at my home on a Sunday night LOL.

Our school has 260 kids so again, this was the most simple YET FUN FUN FUN project to do and the kids and parents just loved it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Our art teacher wants the PTO to help with this same type of fundraisier (can't remember which company). Our biggest challenge is she has K-5 and wants to have all 800+ students take part or at least be offered!

Besides McDonalds, what worked, how did you organize it....can you tell the idea is overwhelming to me?

I was just reading the Original Works topic below and wanted to comment on KidsKards fundraiser we just did.

We have so far been very impressed with KidsKards. We teamed up with our Art Teacher for this. KidsKards suggest that we send the artwork home for the parents to view but that is very risky so we made sure all the artwork was ready by our Oct PTO meeting at McDonalds (during our McTeacher night) and parents/grandparents came and were able to view it right there.

Personally our timing for the project was a challenge. We had originally scheduled our Fall fundraiser last year, then the district moved the first day of school back a week so we had to reschedule our Fall fundraiser and Kids Kards orders were due just 9 days after turning in our fall fundraiser . ..then school pictures just happened to be that same week? So that was our only challenge with getting parents to do the kidskards fundraiser.

We have had more POSITIVE feedback on this project than anything else we've done in the past and parents are begging us to continue doing this.

It has been little work and EASY communication with the company. We saved 5-7 mailing days by having them email us the proofs before they went to print and are expecting the final product a week and a half before what was planned which is great.

KidsKards was very good at explaining what colors/materials work and which ones don't scan too well.

Our Art teachers had all the kingergarten do snowmen with paint, 1st grade did penguins with paint, 2nd grade did reindeer with construction paper and pastels and 3-6 were free to do what they wanted and let me tell you, THERE WERE SOME GREAT ONES!!!!!!! Some were great in a creative way, some were great in how they used their colors, some were great in the theme of the picture. Teachers were so impressed that they ordered ones who's parents couldn't afford to participate at the time because the artwork was just tooo good not have it used.

For more info, you can go to www.kidskards.com

Again, it has been painless and awesome results for the students and their selfesteem!