We have four sources of funds:

School spirit sale. We don't mark the items up much, and make about $2,000 a year. It's easy as the funds are sent with the order and the items picked up during conferences in Oct.

Boxtops. We submit twice a year. We have an excellet chair who takes care of everything. Last year we received about $1,400.

School store. The goal here isn't to make gobs of money but to provide something fun for the kids. We made about $500 last year.

Spring chocolate sale. We work with Niagara Chocolates and they've done a better job each year. Last year we only had a few orders missing items and very few broken pieces.

This is time consuming but worth it. It takes someone a few hours to write the letter and distribute the packettes to go home. When orders come in we check them over as a committee it takes half a day for 6-8 people. Then when orders come in we have distribution 3 nights from 6-9. We get a lot of teacher help on this. We make 50% and make roughly 15K a year on this.

We have people pushing to do a catalog sale in the fall. Wrap and stuff for Christmas. I'm afraid it'll take away from the chocolate sale and we'll just be doing a second fundraiser for the same results. I'm also conserned that we're just asking too much of the parents.

Everything isn't PTA related, but it seems something comes home regarding money every few weeks.

Since school started we've had to send money for field trips (PTA pays for the bus), PTA membership, school pictures, plus any falls and winter sports your kids join. Next month will be our sweatshirt sale. If we wanted to do something before Christmas, we'd have to get it out by the end of October. Then it feels like we no more than get done with the holidays and we have our spring chocolate sale to think about.

We aren't in need of more funds.

We have enough to cover the programs we want to support and give 13-15K a year for field trips for 1,100 students. Any more we raise will just go to the field trip fund, reducing the parent contribution for trips by a couple bucks a year. I just don't think it's worth it.

Hi-

I'm new to this board and to school fundriasing in general. But, our local school is in deperate need of funds with very few volunteers. So, I'm taking the plunge.

My question is:
Is there a product sales fundraiser available online instead of doing pre-selling with order forms or buying up a bunch of stuff and then selling it?

For example, you decide your school wants to sell x item. So, you advertise x item and that company to your family, friends, community members, etc.. But, instead of taking handwritten order forms, people can just go on-line, place their order and pay via cc, and then put in a code so that the school gets credit for their $. Then the company processes and mails out the order and when the fundraiser is over, they send a check or transfer whatever the school earned into the school's account.

We got $130 for taking plastic shpooing bags back to walmart. You have to love selling trash! Another easy one was bumper stickers. We got those new oval international-style stickers with the school letters on the back. The printing was donated, so we got 100% of the $3.00 per sticker. Plus stickers are light and small and easy to store We got them here: elysehutchinsondesign.com/stickers - she is a mom on our PTAC.

Our school is in desperate need of playground equipment. We have been raising money for playground equipement for the last 3 years selling the obvious.....wrapping paper, candy bars and hosting fall festivals. This year we decided to sell Smencils. These are 100% recycled gourmet scented pencils ( SMENCIL WORLD - Smencils.com 1-866-SMENCILS (763-6245) ) Not only did we offer them for sale, we encourged our teachers to get involved by playing a game......."Who can sell the most Smencils". The winning teacher will get money to spend in his/her classroom and the students will get an ice cream party. These pencils have gone fast!!! I can't keep them. I ordered 1 bucket of 50 for each class to start off with. I had one class sell 92 pencils in one day. The profit is 50% IF you find a distributor. If you purchase from smencil.com the profit is 46% (?).

This has been quick/fast money with almost no effort.

I can't believe NO ONE mentioned Uncle Jerry's Tee's fundraiser...it worked GREAT for us last year. We have very low participation in our fundraisers, and we only had 40 kids participate out of almost 200; and we earned a little over $1,000. I thought this was great not only because of the large profit for us, but also because Uncle Jerry's does EVERYTHING...they send you posters, the order forms, the catalogs, free samples, etc...and the samples are some of the best items in the catalog! If a child sells 12 items, they get one free. Also, they provide the "toy" items provided as incentive to sell so many items as well. When it comes in, it's already all packaged per student for you, so all you have to do is double check and hand them out!! Not only all of that, but we had a few late orders that came in past the date we closed out the fundraiser...they were more then happy to fill it anyways, and we earned additional profit as well.

Check them out online, you can view everything at UncleJerrysTees.com
I am pretty sure that's it.

We are doing it again this year!!

Angela Robinson;79373 wrote: What other restaurants participate in these fundraisers?

We are trying new restaurant fundraisers this year. McDonalds, CiCi's Pizza, Papa John's, Chick-Fil-A. Our local bowling alley also is doing a fundraiser night. For $8 each you get bowling, shoes, hotdog and pop, and 1 round of put-put golf. $3 goes back to the school.