We started going with nicer prizes after parents started complaining about junky prizes. Most kids get at least $5.(more often it's $15 if it's an older student) to play games, so that translates to the same amount in prize redemption. The kids know to save up their tickets so when they go to the booth they want the bigget prize there is, not the dinky stuff that everyone knows will be broken or lost before they get home. When beanie babies were hot, 5 years ago, they were the perfect prize. Well made, popular and not too expensive. I just read the opening post again and realized that I never answered that question - How do you know how many to get? You'll never know how many people will actually attend an event because a lot depends on weather. If it's a first time event, who knows?? At my school - 300 kids, semi-rural, we spend about $800 on prizes. The bulk of the prizes are $2.50 in value. Good luck!
What is popular at our elementary school is inflatables. Aliens, baseball bats, etc. We have two sources for prize toys, one is USToy, which does have a website although we go to their retail store. The other one has mostly inflatable toys and it's in Allentown PA. They may have an on-line website but I don't know. You could google inflatable toys in Allentown, PA. very reasonably priced. For our school, the kids tend to spend big bucks on games and our top prizes are in the $5.00 range. We pre-sell tickets at 5 for $1.00 and then 4 for a dollar on the day of the festival. I think our budget is @$800. Our prize tickets are worth approximately 20 to 25 cents. So if a game is played for 2 tickets, the winner will get 2 prize tickets, they can then redeem it for approximately 40 to 50 cents in prizes.
The important thing is that the prize tickets MUST match up with the amount of prizes you have bought. Each booth is given about $75 worth of prize tickets and then some are kept back at the prize table for later, once we see which games are more popular, we'll run more tickets to them. The booths themselves can borrow between each other too. One year we actually ran out of tickets and we're forced to let people play for free. Since the majority of our games were homemade classroom games, it wasn't too bad but some were ones we rented and we had counted on revenue from them.
What we did for our carnival was from our budget set an amount for prizes. In our case 1000 dollars then we divided that by the number of students which in our case was 180 students. that worked out to 5.50 a kid. So we decided that a 4 dollar stuffed toy would be the "Grand Prize. Then we picked up 1 dollar prizes and 50 cent prizes. Then the company we went with let us over order and only pay for what we need. If you live in northeastern pa we delt with Fundraising USA. Wonderful company.
Print shops always have ooops that could be fun fillers, pens, pencils...stuff that was the wrong color, spelling errors, etc.
My girls friend told me about extra toys that come outta Happy Meals offers that could be a possible source for a donation. How about leftover items from your school store? Insurance agents, Real estate agents,Fun Servies, Dollar Store...
