Well said, BK! The data shows that catalog sales work best in certain areas (in less economocially challenged schools) and cookie dough/food sales work better in more economically challenged areas....bottom line is...they work! Bringing in thousands of dollars of profit to the school through one of these easy fundraisers is a better choice than haircuts, dining out or other small programs...period.

And, by the way, just from personal experience...those trash bags are NOT the same quality as my trusty Glad tie string bags at ALL, and they do NOT have a built in tie AND they cost me $10 I think....they are still sitting in the back of my pantry never to be used.

This post is really starting to get out of hand. jes2010 did it as well by saying she stopped participating in product fundraisers and is promoting affiliate programs. I mean, let's all get on the same page here:

A good product fundraiser such as a fall catalog or cookie dough fundraiser is not the same thing as a hair cut event, trash bag fundraiser or affiliate program or the majority of fundraisers chiming in on this post. Please take a good look at Rockne's previous post from a few minutes ago.

I understand everyone wanting to get their opinions out there but it's starting to sound more like mis-information. With school budgets being what they are, schools should know what type of outcome they will have from their efforts and not take any big chances.

Seriously, don't get rid of a product fundraiser in favor of an affiliate program.

This post started out by saying that product fundaisers aren't working and was quickly inundated with a variety of events and products that won't work as well as the product sales everyone started off complaining about - yikes!

Everybody makes valid points about their respective fundraisers. Some work great, some flop it's really tough to tell unless you give something a try. In my experience everybody wants to help, it's just getting tougher and tougher to do so and if a family can get something useful at a reasonable cost they are more than willing to participate.

We have sold trash bags in the past and the families love it. The bags are better than what is in stores and are priced similar. The families aren't burdened to buy something they don't need. We've done it for years with consistent growth (even the last couple years).

www.frontierbag.com

I completely agree. Like anything else, you have to take the good with the bad. What we've done to combat the bad is try to incorporate every day purchases into our fundraising efforts. One example of what we did was start a credit education website. This not only helped members of our PTA, but it proved to be a very lucrative form of fundraising even with the costs associated with the software. (We actually used the software to build a website for the PTA and then monetized it!)

There are tons of other ways to get creative and generate revenue at the same time. I'll list a few examples:

This is the program we used and were successful with:

www.affiliatelease.com/pta.html

These are other programs that we considered:

www.orbitz.com/App/Affiliate
www.cj.com
www.linkshare.com
www.cafepress.com/cp/info/affiliate/

We went with the first one because we felt this was the best "low pressure" idea we came up with. It pays for itself and then some. The other one we are going to use is the Cafe Press for our school shirts and clothes because it is the least amount of work, at least we hope!

I see alot of people posting about selling stuff. Times are tough for parents. There are children that their parents can't afford hot lunches. They are not going to buy over priced wrapping paper, cookie dough, candles, or safety cards. Having something like a hair cut night will not only benefit the school but help needy parents. Ask local salons if any hair stylists are interested in volunteering their time to cut hair at the school for a few hours and all the proceds go to the school. The parents only pay $5 a hair cut for the kids and the school keeps the proceeds. You can even do a bake sale at the same time to increase sales. Homemade goods for cheap prices is not as bad. Everytime you have a fundraiser company involved, they have to make their money too. Your going to be paying 4 times the amount the product actually costs.

I understand the spirit of this post, but I'd caution that it's over-stated a bit or quite a bit.

There are all kinds of "nice" fundraisers, like hair cut night. But given that we're calling it a fundraisier and using it to fund our good work, we also have to ask how many funds it raises? The "selling" fundraisers may be down for you right now, but does that mean they're down from a $15,000 profit to a $13,000 profit? If you replace that $13,000 profit with a hair cut night, you're going to go from a $13,000 profit to a $2,000 profit. And if you replace it with 6 things similar to a hair cut night, then you're going to be fundraising all the time.

I definitely see the challenges to traditional fundraisers, but I also see the very good things (fairly consistent/tested profit performance, good systems, less labor on you). Those need to be weighed in. Too easy just to trash them.

Finally, on the quote re: paying 4 times the actual costs. I think that's a significant exaggeration. If you mean compared to "the actual costs to make something", then we nearly always pay lots more than itr actually costs to make something, even when shopping at Target.

But if you mean "4 times what parents could buy it for on their own", then that's well exaggerated. Fundraiser items are often (not always) more expensive than what you'd find at the store, but not by that much. And further, that mark-up goes a long way toward your profit.

Just food for thought....

Tim

We stopped participating in selling fundraisers completely because it just wasn't working out. We've had pretty good success with other experimental fundraising techniques. Some have been duds but others have been fairly lucrative but it depends greatly on the size of your school.