Our Local PTO's got together & decided one person or one group would go to each local merchant asking for dicounts to be placed on cards with permission given to all schools in the county.(Our entire county has 2 wal-marts & 1 home Depot if that helps with the visual.)This saves us time as well as them. This way only one school is taking up there time!
Discounts could be 10 percent off or buy one get one, etc.
We then go over the list of merchants & each school chooses wich merchants they prefer. We use a business card template to print the master, make copies on card stock, laminate & sell for $5. Maybe we're un cutting ourselves. [img]smile.gif[/img]
We also use 2-3 merchants on the back of our PTO cards. Merbership is $6 for 2 cards.
I must admit tinajack had a much better idea [img]smile.gif[/img]
Just to clarify, that's not scrip. Scrip is (basically) buying gift certificates at face value for major retailers and restaurants. $10 gift card to Pizza hut costs you $10. School makes $1 because school bought the card at a discount.
The program described above is best called "Discount Cards." You'll find Discount Card companies and Scrip companies in our "PTO Yellow Pages" (look at nav bar on left). With discount cards, you can use a third party to put your program together or you can do-it-yourself by reaching out to local vendors and using Kinko's or the like. At the end of the day, your supporters are paying $10 or $15 or so for a card that has 5 or 10 or 15 "offers" on it. (10% off at the dry cleaner -- good for the whole year; buy one Big Mac get a free small drink). Works pretty well for some groups.
Is that what scrip is? LOL! I never could get that straight.
I've bought one of those cards but I gave $15 for it. Maybe used it once, it expired within a year, but I am not in the greatest location. It had several resturaunts on it. It must've done good because the band (that who I bought it from) used it again.
I am on the fundraising committee of our newly formed NTSO and the chair person had several different kinds of those cards. We even discussed by passing a company and making our own. That way all profit would be ours.
As I need A LOT of money for a playground this sounds great--but is this like Scrip? I mean how does the company selling the cards profit? The cards were $1 each--so it was like paying $1 for a $5 coupon? Please email me the details--my interest is piqued!
