We are now working on our 3rd annual Fall Festival and one major piece of advise is to start early if you can. When we were looking for donations for our silent auctions and sponsors we were told "we have met our donation budget for the year." in August. We found a lot of companies take their budget and divide it up in the first quarter and then a lot of chains have to send all donation requests to corporate. Have a letter drawn up that you can leave with the businesses and make sure it clearly states your goal and what you are looking for. We had just two people working on the festival for the past two years due to the fact that it is so hard to get volunteers to help but this year we have broken it up into committees. I will let you know how that works out. We have a committee for each of the following areas: food, games, prizes, bake sale, auction, raffle, 50/50, follow up and we were going to have a chairperson but due to lack of someone willing to step up we are leaving it up to the committee heads to communicate. I hope that goes well. I will tell you that we did get a lot of monetary donations from places this year because we told them that what ever they felt comfortable with would be great. We would usually start by telling them where we were from, what we were doing and then went into what we were looking for. I usually said something like
Hi, my name is Dawn and I am with the Shipman Elementary PTO. We are having a fall festival this year to help pay for playground improvements. Our kids asked for a rock climbing wall and a big slide. We are looking for businesses that would like to donate to or sponsor this event. Anything you would be able to provide would be helpful.
Sometimes we had the businesses that would ask more questions and we had the occasional NO before we got our pitch out but overall we had pretty good luck. But like I said it is best to start early if you can.
Thank you very much! Yes that was helpful, I like all those ideas. I will let my committee know and hopefully we can make it happen.
Thank you again very much.
Kristina
Kristina - Our PTO didn't get started until the end of August last year and we held our first ever Fall Festival the first Friday in November. A lot of scrambling and we weren't counting on making money, but we cleared just over $5000. Our school is a PreK-8 and we have close to 1500 students so there may be some differences between our schools.
We tried to keep things pretty simple for our first time. Instead of charging money at each area, we set up ticket booths. Each ticket cost $.25 (we pre-sold them for $.20 during lunch all week). Each area had a pricing sheet to show how many tickets for each item. For ex. hot dogs were $1 or 4 tics. It made it so much easier than having volunteers keep track of cash or make change. Quite honestly, I think our treasurer would have gone insane otherwise. Here are some things we had:
Food - hot dogs, chips, sodas, baked goods. A lot of this was donated by local grocery stores or given to us at a discount.
Face painting - our art teacher and an aide volunteered to do this - I think we charged the kids $2 (8 tics)
Games - we had about 29 little carnival games (I think we purchased them from schoolcarnival.com) that were relatively inexpensive. We asked local businesses to "sponsor" the games. We charged 1 tic and everyone got some little trinket.
Bounce house - A parent paid to have one there for the smaller kids. Free for the little ones.
Pictures - Two teachers volunteered to set up a fall themed background with haybales and took Polaroids of the kids for $2 (8 tics)
Hayride - We're in a rural area so we have land around our school. We also have several parents with flatbed trailers that the kids could load up on and take a short ride. We didn't charge for this, but we will next year just to help manage the crowd getting on and off the trailer.
Sponge toss - Our principal made a huge target out of plywood with a hole cut out just slightly larger than his head. He and the dean took turns all night having kids throw big, wet sponges at their faces for $1 (4 tics - the kids love it, even my Pre-Ker!!)
DJ - We found a cheap DJ to play a bunch of differnts kinds of music. A parent had some white rope lights that we used to mark off a dance floor. We also used white Christmas lights to give it a neat feel.
Basket raffle - I know a lot of people use these for their silent auctions, but we haven't put on an auction yet. Each class sponsored a themed basket and we charged $1 per raffle ticket(This we actually charged the money to get the raffle ticket). We did the raffle at the end of the festival and we were surprised at the number of people that stuck around just to see who won what basket (being there was not a requirement).
Hope this helps. If anyone else has any ideas, I'd love to hear about them. We're trying to add to our festival to make it even better. [img]smile.gif[/img]
type in fundraisers in your search area all kinds of places will pop up there i can not tell you what we use here cause they would be different from what you have there also try calling some local schools and asking them what they our doing they arevery helpful well most of the time
Hey All,
I am finishing up my 1st time on a PTA/O heading into my 2nd as Fundraising Chair. This current school year we got a very late start with our PTA so there wasn't much in the fundraising area. I am trying to get together ideas for next year so we can get started asap. Where would I find info on putting on a Fall Festival Fundraiser? I am the current Event Chair for our local Relay for Life but this school thing is new to me so any ideas and help I can get would be greatly appreciated. You can email me directly if you want with any ideas and advise. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Thank you so much for the help.
Kristina
