We have a variety of things in play, you touched on some of them. We will not do any big events without a clear goal for the money. I know that has happened in the past and it is a very bad practice. People already pay a lot for their kids to go here. There is some pressure from our admin to make more than we have, and I am not sure what will do it.
You did great making 34K! How big is your school and what grades?
We've had a wide range: our most recent auction netted $34k (4th time we'd done one, at a nice off site location) while our first winter carnival last year made only $1900. Alot of that has to do with our goal. We did not set up the carnival to make a huge profit. We wanted it more to be a "give back" event to our families and we set ticket prices accordingly. (auction was at k-1 school/400 kids, carnival 2-5 school with 650 kids, public).
When you debate this issue, ask what your PTO's goal is. We wanted to make alot of money on our auction because, as a PTO, we decided the auction should replace our standard catalog fundraiser and hopefully provide additional $$ for extras (it did). On the other hand, our carnival was set up to be only a small portion of our overall budget and we did a standard catalog fundraiser that year, too, to cover the bulk of our budget.
Is the debate based on people wanting to cut carnival ticket prices? Do you NEED to make that much money? Does your budget depend on the $16k? OR Do people want to make more? Can you show the parents how the profits will be spent before the actual carnival takes place? Maybe there's faction who is uncomfortable with making money that isn't designated to some budget line. Not sure that's your case, but just throwing out things to consider.
i would like to say i could only wish we had made that much money. our school had 185 students, and 4 pto members, and we were a public school(our school was closed down on the last day of school last year due to budget cuts). i am very proud of the almost 3000.00 dollars we did in fact profit, but we only spent 350.00 to buy to put towards the carnival. we did collect over 1000.00 from our community in items we raffeled.so i would say you have done a great job. if you break it down you made about 80.00 dollars per child. thats more than i could ever ask for.
I am wondering how much money you expect to make from your big event, for example, evening event with silent auction or spring carnival. We are a private Montessori preschool through sixth grade with about 200 kids. We have had some disagreement between our parents organization and the administration and the board regarding what we should be making each year at the big event. (We have made $16,000 each of the past two years.)
If you respond, could you say how big your school is, what age kids, public/private?
