Thanks for all of the input. I think we're going to just have to get creative budget wise. There are so many great idea here, thanks for your help.

I agree with the one big fundraiser per year. We have a huge carnival/auction/chili supper one Sat. in Oct each year. We make more than enugh to cover our budget in just one day. Our school is a small, lower income school, but we make bag. It's a lot of work. We start like summer time getting donations and such, but by the end of Oct. it's all done for the whole school year.

For many years now, we have had one large fundraiser and try to leave the catalog and smaller ones for the students themselves. The large one brings in enough for our yearly budget and allows the parents to focus their energy on that. This also helps keep parent burnout low - we have found that having too many of the smaller/catalog fundraisers will cause burnout and that in turn causes the funds raised to be much lower than desired.

Actually, our PTO does not run the catalog fundraiser, the schools does. It is currently going on now, along with book fair and pictures... looks like they are going to fall short somewhere, this is a low income school.

That is why PTO isn't doing anything until November, to give the parents a break!

I don't have any advice, in fact I just came to this board to post the same thing. Our fall fundraiser (catalog of course) netted half what we expected and budgeted for and sadly last year we cut back pretty far into the budget so I'm not sure where else we can trim.
I'm trying to brainstorm ideas at the moment so if you think of anything, please please share!
Right now our ideas include doing a Pasta Feed and silent auction or a Sock Hop.
Another great fundraiser we've done in the past has been Movie Night but student council took that from us this year. Last year we made over $400 on our first one and that certainly would have helped at this rate.

I don't know if you saw my posting on the non-food forum but I have a friend that is doing an Olan Mills portrait fundraiser. She is doing it this month and it is going great. It is 100% profit. Seems like everyone wants pictures for Christmas. You can get the number at olanmills.com