Fundraising ideas for Pre-school where we can get parents involved?

[Ilovecurry]

Im desparately in need of some ideas for fund raising for our pre-school please

OK

Raffle/auction - get parents to donate prizes and work local and corporate contacts

Event - band/dance and food sell tickets at school gates - themes black tie, salsa, barn dance (don't know if you're in the country!)

Pamper evening - rope in anyone with skills like beautician, massage, reflexology (you get the picture!) and invite all ladies you know

If you know people with contacts, try and get businesses to donate items. But in the current climate its like trying to extract blood out of a stone.
It's going to be a difficult year for everyone, just getting the parents to pay on time is a challenge!
Best thing you could try is to apply for as many grants as you can.
Another thing we did last year and it worked quite well was to do a local quiz and a quiz on things you can find on the internet (logos and other things) and then we sold the quiz to parents and their friends for £2 a go and the prize was a hamper incl wine.
We raised almost £400!
Hope these ideas help.

One of our committee members works for a firm who does match funding so when we raised £300 say on our sports day then they will match it which is a great way of getting parents involved and getting charitable donations from firms.

our preschool does christmas and easter bazaars. We have done a ladies bingo night and quiz night, but not recently. We're going to do a pamper evening in May and the ladies all seem quite keen.

Also, we thought we'd do a sponsored something invloving the children. So we're doing a sort of asault course thing(tunnels, bit of a climbing frame etc) and combining it with Comic Relief so we split the money raised. Not sure how we'll split it yet maybe 50:50.

We also have a sports day where we raise a little bit of cash, but not much.

We raise most of our money at the christmas bazaar, mainly the raffle.

One of our committee also is able to get match fundraising so this year we had an extra £400 from christmas. We're thinking of a way to ask other parents if they can get match fundraising too as it's a fab way to pick up money for no more effort.

Try www.bag2school.com. We also do printed teatowels with kids handprints, sponsored obstacle course with parents invited so we can sell them tea and cake. Easter bonnet parade where you charge kids to enter their bonnet and again invite parents along. We find that we can raise more money during a session as we get max. no. of parents their to watch their little darlings - then you need to have other things to sell, such as guess weight of cake, raffle draw etc. we do bingo and quiz nights but they are often only attended by committee and some staff - the bulk of parents can't or won't come out at night. Bonny baby competition where staff bring in baby snaps.

For "passive fundraising", you could always register at www.schoolfundraising.org.uk and then request that parents use your preschool's page on this site (e.g. "www.schoolfundraising.org.uk/rinky-dink-preschool") as their home page. Your page will have links to popular online stores (e.g. Next, Play.com, Amazon, etc), plus a wide range of specialist online retailers. Purchases made via links from the site can earn your preschool cash-back donations of between 1 and 10% (2% seems typical) at no extra cost to the parents.

Huge selling points: minimal physical effort required (just an online PC and one flexible index finger required) and it's 24/7 fundraising!

Once registered, you can also print off free personalised flyers to hand out to parents.

Hmmm...I wonder if I can ask the site for referral fees!

Pudding Evenings always go down well.

If you bring a pudding - £3 - Adults and free for child
f you don't bring a pudding £5 and £1 per child.

get everyone to let you know what pudding they are bringing and so you only get one or two of the same thing.

All you have to provide is the location, seating, crockery/cutlery and music for atmosphere. Hold a raffle and you should make a few hundred pounds profit. We managed in our small village to do this.

If you do it in the spring/summer then more kids will want t come to.

We also held a Breakfast Day where everyone paid £5 for a cooked breakfast and drink. Charged extra for raffle, danish's etc.

Sponsored read (our Nursery did this with parents noting down how much time was spent with the child reading over a week)

Does anyone cycle or run. My hubby is doing a few cycle sportif's of 100 miles plus which all allow you to do sponsorship for your own choice of charity/needy place etc. Perhaps someone would be interested in doing this.

Progressive Supper around local villages, quiz night.

Good luck

Auction of promises? Then people can promise (for example) to bake a cake, help at a birthday party, do an evening's babysitting - prevents it always being the same few parents donating prizes.

I would strongly suspect that in an environment of pay cuts, etc, fund matching from large employers may be next to go if it hasn't already.

Hi ... I am co-ordinator of my dd's parent group, and we are involved in fundraising. We are having a raffle, one of our dads will visit local companies with a letter to ask for donations, but just from using our contacts we have some great prizes already. For World Book Week we are having a book sale of second hand books from donations and a £1 donation for dressing up as a book character. We are also having a summer open day with craft activities, etc, and in the autumn a chocolate and Ann Summers evening!

Other ideas are sponsered walk, cake sale and easter egg hunt.

Hope it goes OK.

Check out the Pre-School Learning Alliance - They have a booklet called 101 fundraising ideas! ( or something)

we used to do an activity for half terms etc.
We have done: how many things can you fit in a smarties box, a hunt (we printed a sheet with boxes on it and each box had to have the item stuck in it eg a bus ticket, a leaf, a shell, a piece of string, a petal, a grain of rice, etc,Or each box can have a letter A-Z and they have to fill box with something starting with the letter) Make a picture using leaves, decorate a kite shape.

A popular events for us were cake sales. We used to send a paper plate home with a little verse saying something about putting a cake on this plate but if you cant cook a £1 will do. Obvoiusly I cant remember the rhyme but it worked a treat in our school!

Just wanted to share this. We've just raised £104.00 through Bag 2 School. This is their websitewww.bag2school.com. They provide as many blue bin bags as you need and you ask parents to fill them with old clothes, shoes, curtain's etc. They give you a collection date and you get paid 40p for every kilogram they take away. It really is that simple!

Hi Mayron - how many bags did you collect (roughly?) we have registered to do this but are now worried we won't get enouh bags filled.....

Well we handed out 50 bags. I would guess there was about 25 - 30 bags - some were black bin bags though which would fit more in. I wasn't there when they came to collect so there may have been more, that's just what I saw when I dropped off my stuff. Curtains and jeans are good because they are heavy!

• [[www.yellowmoon.co.uk] - kids craft items - they give you free catalogues, when people buy things using your code, you get a percentage.

• www.northbrookfundraising.co.uk - same idea as Yellow Moon but with wrapping paper and cards.

• www.dephoto.co.uk - they come to your sports day or other event free of charge and take photos - you get 10% of all photos and photo gifts sold.

• www.stuartmorris.co.uk - tea-towels etc. with the kids' pictures on them - people can't resist buying these!

Try 'Phil' the Bag - it's so easy. All you have to do is hand out the free bags that they supply for the kids to take home and fill up with their old clothes and shoes and other textile things and then they bring them in on your Recycle Day, they are collected and weighed and then you get paid!;-)) I have just noticed in one of their ads that they are now paying £600 per tonne! we are definitely signing up for it again this year, we made nearly £450 last year, just like that! The driver is quite tasty too! Ha ha! The website is www.philthebag.co.uk

Oh, we've also done the tea-towel thing,..which worked really well,.especially before xmas time...great pressies for grannies!

At half term I got some of those little brown paper mache boxes from hobby craft, paper mached them closed (kitchen roll with flour and water), and cut a slit in the top. Sent them home as an activity for the kids to decorate over half term and the parents to fill with change. Everyone made a real effort and we made about £70, but it felt nice as even those who could't afford anything got to do the activity.

Suttons seed catalogues, we raised about £80 (you get the catalogues, give them to parents and get 20% of any sales)

Invitation voucher books (just get them out before the primary school does!) think they come out in February.

We just did a curry & quiz night and raised over £600 but that was with great raffle prizes (£240 from raffle).

We also use bag2schools and have raised £360 in the past year (we have approx 100 children in school so not too bad). we also use thegivingmachine.co.uk and have raised over £200 for doing nothing!

We recently did a cash raffle offering a £50 first prize, £20 second and £10 third - we sold £650 of tickets giving us £570 profit.

We do the obligatory School Disco, School Quiz, Fetes etc, but one thing we have did for the first time last year which worked really well along our sportsday - but I think would be good alongside any fete or fair or as a stand alone project is an art exhibition.
We used www.minimasterworks.co.uk/, we worked together with art coordinator to get good A4 picture from each student and then minimasterworks did the rest, they turned up on the day with our kids pictures blown up into A3 prints that were framed, had their name underneath - really nice. The company gave us a cut of every frame that was bought. For parents that had more than one child at the school there were reductions, and if you were feeling skint you could buy a pack of postcards of your child's print £6 for 8 postcards. I took these home, bought some small frames and gave them out to aunts and uncles as presents. Great! We will be doing it again this year. I think we raised about £200+