I say do the pizza party AND send home something letting the parents know that it wasn't successful and possibly ask for suggestions (getting some more parents involved with ideas is always good).
That really stinks! I was wanting to purchase a 4-wheeler or something along those lines at cost and sell raffle tickets for a few months and raffle it off at the carnival in April. I kept putting it on the back burner and now it's too late. What a hard lesson to learn. What do you think went wrong? So, others can avoid the same fate? It sounds like a good alternative to the "regular" fundraising with cookie dough, etc.
Yup, you need to do the pizza, there is no way that the kids had anything to do with the failure of your event. I am not part of a PTO so I can't answer the rest of your questions but I am sorry your fundraiser failed.
We ran a raffle fundaiser. The prize was a Harley Davidson motorcycle. We ended up losing $4000 instead of making $15k+ we anticipated. I know. Huge difference! We have learned a lot about doing "this kind" of fundraiser, however, I'm struggling with the lack of honesty about our totals during the fundraiser . We questioned the person in charge of tracking the tickets several times through the process and seemed to be left with different answers each time. One of us had to confront her which was uncomfortable seeing that she is our president and I was asking to take over the tracking. Unfortunately, this happened only two weeks prior to the big drawing. I discovered that our totals were not correct and I felt we were severely misleading our families about our progress. Our problem now is we promised the grade who sold the most a pizza party. It also seems to be getting blown off when we ask about it. The fundraiser wasn't successful and has a looming black cloud over it. Should we still have the pizza party in light of the failure? Do we send a letter out to the students and parents? I feel very strongly that people need to know exactly and directly what happened. I'm not getting the same feeling from our president. I feel like the bad guy or the downer when I approach the subject. What would you do?