I have been a PTO President for 3 years, and while our school isn't considered a low income district..I would certainly consider us "low interest"...magazine, wrapping paper, even pizza sales have never worked for us..and it was very frustrating. We have however found a few things that really turned things around for us and here a few ideas...
bring the outside community in...a mom at our school is a Zumba instructor...Zumba is a fun latin dance that anyone can enjoy, young,old, any race....you could probably find one very easily in your area..anyway....they do fundraisers all the time...here's how it worked..she used her classes to promote to event, so MOST of the people who came were not even people from our school, they were community members! We did it in our gym, served water in big jug coolers and it was huge! We raised almost $4,000 with little at all coming from our students!
also we found the food usually works...we found a local deli who gave us a deal for selling their sandwhiches...they were cheap @ $4 a sub and we made $1.50 off each one...that made us another $1500
We also held a car wash in our school parking lot....this was a big one! And we didn't even need too many people to participate, we had a lot of staff that were happy to come...we advertised in the local community paper and in the grocery stores, being sure we let people know it was for our kids and the school! We made @ $3,000 from washes and donations!
Hope some of this may help you, and I know how frustrating it can be..hang in there, best wishes!!!
I have been searching most of the summer to come up with some ideas for fundraisers. We are a primary school (pre-k thru 3rd) with about 300 students, the vast majority of which are from low income families. Our PTO also has very little money to work with.
Does anyone know of any good fundraisers that we could try? Because of the income level, I really don't want to send home fancy wrapping paper and expensive cookies, ya know? I would really like to find something that everyone could afford and enjoy, but I'm not finding it!
