Have you tried talking to your local civic organizations? I know that Kiwanis, Rotary and the like are good about helping with this sort of thing. If you call the events chair for each organization and ask to get on their agenda as a guest speaker, then present to the club(s) your project and ask for monetary help, they are usually good about helping.
Another avenue is to ask the club(s) to help think of ways to raise funds. These folks are good about knowing the right people around town and what works well in fund raising.
What about a restaurant night-- this could be done monthly with little help-- McDonald's and Wendy's offer family nights- it's 2-3 hours 1 night a month and you receive 10-15% of the total profits from whoever comes out and purchases food-- This would be a great fundraiser if there are only 2-3 teachers involved and you could send out letters to families, friends, whomever and post the fundraising night everywhere-- Good luck!
Get someone to donate 2 - 4 Yankee (or other local team) tickets. Or purchase some, if you must.
Sell raffle chances for $5 apiece. Depending on the team, they could really
go like hotcakes and this would take only 2 people to run. Costs would be to print raffle tickets (can be done online), brochures, raffle permit and cost of game tickets, if not donated.
Could do some other sort of raffle. A year's worth of movie tickets, a software collection, a book series (Harry Potter boxed set).
As part of IDEA 2004, school districts across the country are being charged with creating 'parent advisory councils' to provide input to their district regarding special education issues and to support special education families. We started ours in January and it's structure is very similiar to school PTOs.
We have asked our school PTO's to support us financially during this start up phase but that will only go so far for so long. That being said, the parents we serve are already overburdened with doctors and behaviorists and therapies so we don't want to ask any more of them. But we need to raise funds for things like speaker stipends, postage, printing, hospitality etc.
We need the good way to raise the most money with the least amount of people possible. Mind you, our needs aren't huge, we would need maybe a two thousand dollars, not tens of thousands. We can't put on events like auctions as our membership is spread out of all the district schools (9 in all). We were thinking of doing a rummage sale but I wanted to ask all of you if you had any other ideas.
