Fund Raising idea for pre-school

[lovebeingamom]

My son started at pre-school earlier this year and I did not realise until then how much they rely on fund raising monies. I run a prt time business selling personalised photo cards and calendars and have decided to produce christmas cards for my own pre-school at a reduced rate so they can sell them on and raise funds. Hopefully its something that many of the parents would be interested in and will help raise much needed funds. I do however want to try and get involved with other ways to help the schools so I was looking for any ideas?
Thanks

We do stuff for ours, we've done:

(1) A local percentage ebay sale (ie you organise the sale for a percentage of the profits - most people have stuff to sell but can't be arsed)
(2) Facepainting but then you offer for a pound extra to have a photo printed of the child done in the paint - it costs 9p to print them if you buy in bulk so it can be worthwhile. Esp. if you charge 50p for second print for grandparents.
(3) Auction of promises

Try Bags 2 School www.bag2school.com. You ask parents to donate old clothes, shoes, fabrics, etc and get 20p - 40p for every kilo donated. Bags 2 School supply the bags to fill and then come and collect the bags at a date and time convenient to you. They weigh the bags before they leave and tell you how much you have raised. We raised over £100 and have booked another collection for October.

Don't think our little pre-school could manage to collect a ton!

You can see if any of your other parents employers can do matched funding. We will be putting a note out next term to all parents asking if they can help as some large firms have 'pots' of money specifically for charitable purposes.

One other parent asked his company for a raffle prize this summer and their policy is not to give out prizes but gave us £200 instead - which was great!

We have also done a shopping evening which didn't generate a huge amount of money but was a great social evening.

We do a raffle at Christmas, Easter and for our Summer Fair. The Christmas one we asked for donations towards a fantastic hamper and had a list of things to go in (ie wine, olives, crisps etc) and it was well received.

We also do Bags2School and raised over £100 but then got it match funded too!

We do Christmas, Easter and Summer Fayres. We also go to the local village fetes and have a stall there which also gets our name out in the village and new children signed up. We do the usual quiz nights and bingo. We have had a band night and an eighties night which was really well attended we got the local pub to provide an outside bar and the mobile chip van called in to sell food. The Disco also gave us 50% discount. In November we are having a winter ball which the vast majority of everything has been donated to us as well. We do alot of fundraising didn't realise how much until I wrote it all down just now!

Do you have a waitrose nearby? Apply to be in their charity of the month wotsit

Thanks for all you ideas!! I would also be happy to do reduced price christmas cards for anyone involved with pre-schools. Feel free to contact me.

Thanks again for all your ideas.