I agree with JHB we also count for the purpose of keeping track. It has become part of the person running the booth to count in (20) and rubberband them and PTO gives each booth a envelope w/rubberbands. And it's up to them to count and turn in to PTO after cleanup. That's a great idea for a ticket counter.
Just an idea. If you are going to count tickets and not want to spend alot of time doing it. We did this once. We have a local video game arcade that has games that issues tickets for prizes. They let us borrow one of their counter. Its a piece of equipment they use that counts the tickets for you. The long strands of tickets are fed through a slot a and counted and shreaded and the loose tickets were stacked and put in a chute, it counted and shreaded them also. It was alot easier than counting by hand.
Tammie: I would have to agree with what JHB has written. That is just about how we did it for the past two years. One of the reasons we counted tickets afterward, was to see which games were most popular and which ones were a waste of time. It worked. We have Blue Pre-Sale tickets(5/$1), and Orange Day-of tickets(4/$1), we also did prize redemption. We also had a student population near 1000, we had 8 game boothes(2-6 tickets each), plus bouncers, dunk tank, food booth, and raffles. It was alot of work and my friend & I chaired it for the past two years, it was such a big hit, everyone must be afraid to compete with what we did, because we had to cancel it this year due to lack of volunteers...go figure. Good luck.
I can see a few reasons for counting the tickets. 1) monitoring activity for each booth, 2) matching tickets to cash (if you aren't tracking tickets sold), 3) since not everyone will use every ticket purchased - knowing what percentage of tickets really ARE used 4) calculating the odds. Was the game too hard? Assuming you don't give a prize for every attempt, what's the average? Did you get 100 tickets for every prize distributed? 5)matching tickets against supplies used
All of this could be helpful for future planning (mostly #1 or #4), but you'll have to balance the value of the info against the work of collecting it.
I would be the type who would want to track the activity per booth by counting tickets, but it's not like counting cash - it wouldn't have to be perfectly exact (and it wouldn't necessarily have to be done that day).
Ideas might be
1) each booth is responsible for counting its tickets as part of their end of day cleanup (or the end of shift). (I'd suggest a prescribed plan - band them in hundreds or whatever).
2) Use the kids. This is a GREAT activity for the volunteer's kids. My second grader begs to count tickets every time. I designate what size stacks or how many in a bag and it keeps him busy during cleanup. All his friends want to help. (Requires minimal supervision.)
3) All our pizza parlors and such that have arcade tickets use ticket counting machines or scales. Could you just keep the tickets separate by booth and ask one of those places to let you use their equipment, maybe the next day right before they open?
4) Estimate using a really accurate postal scale.(My husband must have gone to the Post Office 50 times to weigh our Pinewood Derby Car on their self service scale.) You'd have to do a little testing to decide how many tickets per ounce.
If you are talking about a large volume of tickets, I'd try weighing.
Note, if you are counting tickets in any attempt to match with cash receipts, you shouldn't use anyone who handled cash for this piece. You should always have more cash than tickets as not all the tickets will be "spent". (Deducting for any free tickets you may have distributed.) Our first clue on a funds mismanagement issue a few years ago was when we had $550 worth of tickets after an event, but less than $500 in the cash box. Unfortunately, this was part of a much bigger pattern...
Actually I don't know why,(?) that's just how our Pres wants to do it. We do have 972 students that attend our school though. We do a prize redemption booth and if the child wins at the booth they earn a different color ticket, than the one they play the game with, if they loose they get a small candy. Then the kids can save their tickets to get big ticket items in the redemption booth. We have 1,2,5,10,20,and 30 ticket items. [img]tongue.gif[/img]
is there a reason you need to know how many come to each booth? we don't keep track. however the most popular games we know because we have to replenish supplies/prizes. and we know the rough amount of total participation due to our total sales. our ticket price is 6/$1.00. and the only booth we require more than one for is the cakewalk. our carnival is pretty small though.
hope this helps.
lisa [img]smile.gif[/img]
