Our catalog fundraiser was also down. Just over a $1,000. I guess it could be a lot worse. We will be doing a cookie dough fundraiser in the spring. This is always popular. We are kicking around the idea of doing a Jog-a-thon or possibly a silent/live auction. People tend to get competitve over items and I think there is $$ to be made there. Our school is located in Michigan and many parents are employed by Delphi. I imagine they aren't spending to much until they know what is going to happen with their jobs. That and all the other disasters this year, I'm sure, affected our sales.

ScottMom#1,

We just finished ours and we were down about 50% from last year this was our 2nd year to do Katherine Beich catalog. (I'm told that the 2nd year with the same company is usually worse, but who knows?)

HOWEVER - I DO think economic factors have had a significant impact (at least in south Texas), most of the schools in our distric have reported a dramatic decrease in their fall fundraisers. Katrina and Rita were certainly key factors here. We enrolled hundreds of evacuated students and then came Rita, creating administrative chaos in her wake - school closings, reschedling of events, make-up days, etc.

It has been a rough start for everyone and fundraising is the last thing people want to think about - except those of us who have to figure out how we are going to pay the bills!

I am asking the same questions you are asking? :confused: What to do now? :confused:
It looks like we aren't even going to have enough money to cover our budget?

To complicate matters even more for us, we lost our Title I funding (about $80,00) because we were short by 6 students when the determination was made (of course that was before the 27 Katrina students we added this year). Another source of revenue was going to be a spirit shop, but our board of trustees changed our school name - leaving us with over $1000 of "personalized" items we haven't been able to sell (not to mention the profit we would have made). So, we are really hurting.

I would love to hear advice from the "experienced" group on how to turn this year around before we end up with a deficit.

One final thing, don't know if you have read anything posted about these "donation lists" for silent auctions or not, but if you can find someone willing to share a list with you - perhaps an auction would help your school. We have one late in the year and it helps.

:confused: (Although, it sound like there is reluctance to share them - which I think is sad. We are all just trying to help our kids. It's a shame that the fear of companies reducing their giving would prevent someone from sharing such valuable information with those in need. I read one post that they made $27K on 150 items. Ours has never come close to that. WOW!!! I can't begin to imagine what that would do for my struggling school...

I really don't think anyone wants to fundraise. Our school is 80-85% free and reduced lunches, so we don't want to put the burden of financially supporting our group and the school on these families. By doing catalog sales, we are able to raise funds through extended families, coworkers, and friends of these families. We have tried silent auctions and don't do well because the people that attend these events are the families who don't have much extra money in the first place.
My main purpose in asking about other groups sales was to determine if it was our new company's catalog, the hurricane issues, gas prices or any combination of the above. After doing some other research, I have come to the conclusion that the main problem was the new company. Our group votes on the fundraisers we will do and this just happened to not do well. We are now talking about forming a committee of students who tend to particiapte in our fundraisers and ask them what kind of stuff is easy/fun to sell and what kind of prizes they want.
I do believe that our sales would have been down because of so many people feeling a need to support the hurricane relief efforts and increased gas prices, but, especially after talking with several of you here, I don't think this was the main issue. Thank you for all of your input.

Our middle school PTO doesn't do significant fundraisers like catalog sales, but we support the school's efforts. Last year they did a discount card that totally bombed. This year was a catalog sale with a selection of gifts, cookie dough, food items.

The principal really tried to get the kids psyched up and volunteered to be duct-taped to a wall if they met a certain goal. They did! Frankly, we were all surprised as this fundraiser has to compete with journalism's, the band's, whatever athletics is doing, etc. But the bottom line is that ours worked out better than usual. So it's very tough to predict.

We did not do a fall fundraiser because the administration did one less than a month into the new school year. We had our first fundraiser, our fall festival, this past Friday and it was a HUGE success. The silent auction made three times as much as last year, and the whole event made more than twice what it did last year. Of course, we had almost all new board members this year, and a lot of new ideas that obviously worked out well.

The PTO is committeed to not doing a selling fundraiser, except our school t-shirts, used book sale, things of that nature. It seems like every organization from sports to scouts sells stuff and parents get really tired of it. We are going to try some new things this year, new events to raise money, and if the fall festival is any indication, I think we will be successful.

The last several years we have worked with Kathryn Beich for our fall fundraiser. We have seen a decline in sales every year. This year we went with just candy and cookie dough. We are a school of 320 students and we made a profit of $12,000. Last year we did KB holiday wishes catalog and made around $18,000. I think it is the economy but we also lost about 55 children who moved to other schools.