I also live in a very small community......100 kids in our school. This year we started doing sporting events using our local firefighters and our police officers as teams. The community has been pretty good about coming out to supports us as they enjoy watching the games and the guy are so naturallyl competitive that it makes for a good game. We did basketball in the fall, dodgeball in February and are planning a softball game for this month. We charge $2 per person for admission and sell the same concessions that we dod during movie nights. The games cost us nothing to do and we've been making about $1,000 per event which is really good for our school.

It is a hard time to do fundraisers, so I wish you the best of luck. I really liked the idea of having families donate their gently used books. I know my kids have plenty of books they'd be happy to donate (and probably even proud to know their books are in their school's library) and help their library.

One thing our parent group does to deal with fundraiser burnout is we only do one or two fundraisers per year, no more. If the parents know right away at the beginning of the year and can even share that with people that are buying from them, it seems to help. Like, no, I will not be showing up here next month too asking you to buy something else.

We also have done Club's Choice in the past and it was very successful, however, it is a lot of work for only a 40 to 50 percent return. The company is wonderful to work with, I agree.

I caution anyone solicited by THE CHIP SHOPPE to NOT use them. We did make a good profit but their customer service and order fulfillment (major backorders, not helpful to families missing items) and promises they made for prizes for the kids after the fact...it was just incredibly disappointing. We had one family tell us they will never do another fundraiser because of their experience with this one, and that was after our presidents did everything they could to try to make up for all the company fell short. (I'd be happy to provide anyone else with more details if needed, just email me.)

I don't know if there is a Papa Murphy's near you, but their program has an 80 percent profit and is very simple (no product delivery) and the $5 cards you sell have a value of $35 for the families using them. So it would be economical for the family to buy a card themselves to and use it. I did this at the last school I worked for and we had amazing success with it.

Have you thought of a walk a thon. we have about 400 kids in our elementary school (k-5) and we raised almost 8000.00. It was amazing to see kids donating their own money toward the cause.

As far as trying to get new books try this..Our local Rotary Clubs have helped us in the past with "grants" for school items. We received a $500.00 grant from them we then went to Usborne books which does matching grants (minimum $500) and we were able to present our library with $1000.00 worth of new books.
Good Luck

Melisy,
Have you tried getting a checking acct at your local Credit Union. We get free checking and savings there. Plus all PTO members can get their own personal accounts.

As for Fundraisering, we are even a smaller school. We have worked real hard on collecting Box Tops for Education. It doesn't cost anyone anything more than buying their groceries. We earned almost $2,000 last year and should be over that this year. We did intensives, like the class that collect the most wins a Pizza Party, then in the Spring, if the school collect $1000 worth of box tops they can wear their PJs to school.

Don't forget Target donates a percentage of sales to your school. Campbell soup labels.

Good Luck.

cyberjf;148037 wrote:
By the way - OP - you aren't related to David Archuleta from American Idol are you?

That's so funny! I get asked that all the time. People say "Hey, are you related to David Archuleta?" I tell them yes because that is my husbands name. But, no, we aren't related to the American Idol as far as I know.