My kids attend a small private school with around 120 kids (maybe 80 families). The school goes from preschool to 8th grade. The school is heavily weighted to the Kindergarten and preschoolers (maybe 50%). We limit ourselves to 3 fundraisers. The biggest one is in the fall with a holiday catalog sale. We use QSP, a Reader's Digest Company. The cool thing about them is that they also are the World Finest Chocolate folks. We do the main holiday catalog with candle, candy and magazine inserts. It works well and is a VERY easy sell. The first year, we got started in late October and raised $4,000. Last year,we raised $5,000. And this year we started early (first week in September) and raised $7,000. It is completely voluntary and typically 60-70% of the families participate. We usually add 3 additional prizes (bike, boom box, personal CD player, play tent, etc.) This year we offered a casual day, if the family collected over $75. It is easy and doesn't take much effort.

do you live in a rural community? we do and we have an energy raffle each year. we sell tickets for a chance at a cord of wood, 100 gallons heating oil, and 100 gallons of propane. the tickets are a dollar a piece. prize for the top seller(the better the prize the better the profit) last year we took in $4500. in profit. it is a good and easy fundraiser during the colder months and the only cost is the ticket imprinting if you get items donated and we only run it 2 weeks.

our best profit was this past year when we had pro baseball team jersey as top seller prize. and a chance at a signed baseball for each 20 tickets sold. our school has 220 students k-8 and 100 families.

As a parent, the "Candy Lady" (or Man) idea would make me extremely unhappy (nothing personal, MomKK03!)

Absolutely, if you give children money and let them buy candy they'd do it.

But if I wanted to give my children candy, I'd give it to them myself!

School curriculums often include something about proper nutrition, etc. To then have the children go to the lobby and gobble up candy seems like a mixed message.

I think scrip is always a good fundraiser to do. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Greta

Chick-fil-a Night is when they designate one night for your school. As many families as you can get from your school goes in and has dinner than a percentage of the sales goes to school.

We volunteer with JROTC and recently did a candle fundraiser that did great. 70 kids and made over 3,000.

We did okay with cookie dough and cheesecakes a couple of years ago but just did not have the facility to keep all the stuff cold between delivery and pick-up by the families. We have lots of very little kids, so the parents had to get into the building to get the stuff. It didn't work for us logistically. But food definitely makes money.

We have 177 students at our school and we just did Joe Corbis Pizza and cookie dough. We raised 3,600 dollars plus. It was EASY and very profitable.