Your top 5 best fundraising ideas please?

[dontdillydally]

I have been given the task of coming up with 20 yes 20 fund raising ideas for both pupils and for parents.

any ideas? please

School disco

Printing t towels with pupils drawings

pupils decorating mugs with special porcelain paint.

Cake sale

School lottery

Jumble sale

bags 2 school

book sale

second hand uniform sale

fun run

Quiz night

beetle drive

Auction of promises.

People offer some hours of gardening/cleaning/ironing/babysitting, lifts to airports, professional services, week in holiday home. Local businesses may offer something too.

These are then auctioned one evening, perhaps with a meal provided.Works best in a wealthy catchment area.

50/50 club. Parents/carers/grandparents pay £12 at the start of the year. Half of the money goes to school funds. Each month a draw takes place and 1/12 of the other half goes to the winner. In order to make 12 draws you can draw twice in some months (eg at Xmas) so that there isn't a problem with school hols.

Pamper night. Get in some local people/parents who do massage/nails/make-up/eyebrows etc. Also have stalls selling home baking, doing handbag/clothes exchange etc. and perhaps some sort of entertainment - DJ, dancing sample classes (eg flamenco etc). Like a girls' night in, only out.

Plant sale. Carers provide cuttings etc. and blag some stuff from local garden centres/DIY sheds. Stalls selling plants/seed planting for children/welly boot raffle etc.

DDs school had a christmas card thing that was great. You had to draw a design on a piece of A4 then it was sent off and printed.
It cost us 10 Swiss francs for 10 cards, but the school got 5 back for the PTO.

Another thing was a recipe book. The parents sent recipes in and it was printed and bound and sold on.

Toy fayre - people donate unwanted toys and you sell them on

Nearly New Sale of children's clothing

cake sale

plant sale (children grow the plants at school, then sell them at the fete etc)

School Ball (lot of effort, but potential big return)

Film night

school disco

A good raffle. By that I mean not little prizes but if you ask around parents/grandparents/uncles/aunts etc of everyone in the school you can usually get some good stuff. We did one and by people donating something usually to do with their job or hobbies our prizes included:

a hot air balloon ride (a balloonist dad), professional family portrait (photographer), painting of a family home (artist), beautifully decorated cakes,
horse riding lessons,
lots of chicken/lamb/pig meat (rural school!),
someone made some lovely cushions that could had a photo print on and decorated (design was chosen by the winner) by a lady who was great at sewing,
piano lessons (music teacher)
going out on boat
even lending a holiday home for a week

It was very successful, it was surprising the variety of skills and jobs that people had and were able to give up (though obviouly depends a lot on the community and how willing people are to help out)

Oh another easy option (realitvely low money gained but good for little kids) is to draw out in chalk/washable spray paint a design on the floor of the playground or hall (school logo, picture of whatever you're raising money for, whatever) and get children to bring in some coppers/5ps/10ps to put on that lines and make the drawing, then take photo, put photo up somewhere and take money.

Would second food/cake/sweet sale - to be honest I would completely bypass the healthy eating thing, by big bulk bags of sweets, a loads of plastic cups, put variety of sweets in each plastic cup, sell for 50p. Voila.

Good one with Easter coming up. Have an Easter Egg raffle. Ask parents to donate eggs as prizes and sell tickets. No outlay, minimum effort, instant profit!

If you have a non-school uniform day, instead of paying to can ask the children to bring in something instead - we normally get asked for Chocolate or sweets which goes to a big chocolate Tombola at Easter (infact we are having our non school uniform day next friday). We have also been asked for a bottle of something before for a bottle tombola.

yes, second that, and also, try to be specific about what you want. We find that if you go in and ask them for a particular thing, you're often likely to get it!

Our Auction of Promises raised £8,500 !!!

Wealthy catchment area.

Also get local estate agent to donate an amount / % if parents use their services. We also did as part of the auction estate agent offered a fixed price sale. We had two parties bidding against each other and raised about £1500 on its own.

Non school uniform day where everyone pays a £1 to take part. There are around 200 dcs at our school and probably 95% take part. Only effort is advertising to parents and collecting money.

Tea towels - each child in a class does a self portrait and they're all put onto a tea towel. People seem to buy these not just for themselves but for GPs etc. I think we bought 3 at £5 each.

Biscuit decorating - volunteers bake plain shaped biscuits and the dcs have bowls of sprinkles and icing to use. Pay 50p to decorate a biscuit and eat it.

Chocolate tombola in fete type scenario is popular.

We did a wet Tshirt comp, mums took part
it was a right laugh, and we made loads of money

Mrs R - you are joking, right?

moid - what type of promises did you sell and how did you sell them?

Cake sale
Shape in school hall/yard filled with coins
Non-uniform days are dead easy
School disco if there's a local cheap disco for hire, plus chocolate tombola

we once had a tube of smarties to fill with 1p coins, doesn't cost each individual a lot and if everyone in the school participates you end up with quite a bit. We did have to buy the smarties ourselves but were given a few weeks to fill them up again once smarties were eaten (which of course had to be done by a responsible adult :) )

hmmSleep I love the teatowel idea, where do you get them printed???