PTA Fundraising Cookbooks

[jassore]

We are looking to do a fundraising cookbook for our PTA, I want to know if anyone has done this and what are the dos and don'ts and what are the best companies to go with. Thanks.

It was a lot of work
No-one wanted to buy one
We divided the recipes into mains/savouries and sweets/puddings/baking - too few recipes for too many categories

Hope it is a better fundraising opportunity for you

We just did a simple photcopied one with a spiral binding. Did get plenty of recipes (mulitcultural catchment). Some of them were in Urdu so we had them translated but included the original.

We did this too with the children (with guidance from their parents) submitting their favourite recipes. Just laminate and spiral bound. Divided into breakfast/lunch/dinner/snacks/vegetarian. The children also cooked some of the recipes at school so photos of them (and their complete dishes) were added.

Went down very well.

We did one a couple of years ago, and raised around £2000. We had them professionally printed, but were able to offset the cost of the printing with advertising/grants/sponsorship so that any books we sold were profit. We included drawings and paintings by the children, and photos they'd taken at home alongside the recipes, which went down well. It was a huge amount of work though, as we did all the design and layout ourselves, and chasing people for recipes was pretty time consuming.

The PTA at our school did this. Kids Literacy homework one evening was to write out their favourite family recipe. That way there was plenty of material and since everyone's was published, most families wanted to buy a copy.
The recipes were named, for example "joe Bloggs favourite chicken curry" or "Freds nanas cottage pie" so the children felt they had written it themselves. Was very successful.

We did one. Sold about six.