Hi Collen,
I am excited that our Catholic school has decided to do the fundraiser, from your experience how many different pies do you offer? What are the most popular ones? Can you share your order form?

Thank you
Betty

Hi everyone!
I wanted to share a fundraiser that we have done last year and are currently doing now. We are a brand new school and opened our doors last year so we tried some new things with fundraising.

The first thing we did is strive for a larger membership drive and that would eliminate the need for smaller fundraisers and door/door selling. We told the parents with a larger membership drive we would use that then our fall fundraiser, a gift shop in the winter, fast fundraisers (at local restaurants), our book fair, job a thon, and silent auction as our only fundraisers. It worked perfectly. We made great money with our membership drive and the parents liked contributing more upfront than having lots of little fundraisers throughout the year. We refused to do catalog sales and our parents were thrilled. So instead of 1-2 dollars for membership we asked for donations of 25, 50, 75, etc WITH the option on putting any amount if they wanted. We offered a very neat coffee mug for free if they made a donation of 25.00 or more. One family even donated 1,000.00!

So that is how we start off our year. Our major fall fundraiser is to do a pie sale. We partnered up with Marie Callender's (not sure if you have them where you are or not but maybe you have a Baker's Sqaure or similar) and we sell Marie Callender's pies just before Thanksgiving. We sell all the season's favorites including pumpkin and it's so easy! The kids sell the pies for 3 weeks drop off the order forms and money and we get all the pies from the restaurant the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. (We do Tuesday since Wednesday is a minimum day and many leave for out of town). Everyone needs pies for Thanksgiving and we sold over 1.600 pies last year. Marie Callender's sold us the pies for 6.99 and we sold to the public for 11.00 and it was fabulous. The parents loved that it was a consumable product and it wasn't out of their budget because most families enjoy pie at Thanksgiving. We loaded up SUVs and took the pies to the school, had parents help us sort it out and we had one family member come to the school to pick up their entire order. The families love the convenience and it is truly an easy sell.

I don't work for the restaurant so I am not promoting them but it is by far the easiest and very lucrative fundraiser. This year my motto was STRIVE FOR FIVE and we encouraged each student to strive to sell 5 pies. We made posters for every classroom that had our motto and the kids are pumped up about it.
I hope this helps you for your fall fundraiser. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Here's to a happy year of fundraising!
Colleen ^i^