Alternative path to School Christmas Fair of dooooooom

[BirminghamCityCentre]

Our primary school have just done our annual Christmas Fair. We had the usual turnabout of asking people for donations then selling them their stuff back e.g. secret gifts, second half toys, jam jar tombola, booze tombola, cake stall. Plus Santa, cafe, games, crafts. It was an expensive three hours of hell for the parents and the kids loved it, sugar fuelled little monsters that they were by the end. We made money. Hurrah.
I am on my knees at the thought of putting the whole school community through this sht every year, it is so inefficient and we drive a lot of the parent body up the wall with it.
Anyone have words of advice/genius on how their school does an Christmas fundraiser for the kids that they will enjoy, still makes money, and doesn't pss off 80% of the parent body, including the 40% who turn up out of obligation?

Thank you DaisyFlowerChain.... kind of you to offer but honestly we did non-uniform, we did all the stuff that works, we made a few thousand pounds. I am hoping to steer us to a different fundraiser altogether rather than tweak the Fair format. I hate it so.

Crochet snowflakes in the process of stiffening with PVA glue and glitter.

Sorry, wrong thread

very nice Mistletoes!

Brilliant. I spent a while working out how you monetised the snowflakes. Imagined a stall selling crochet snowflakes all made by the children.

While I love the PTA, this just makes me sad that government doesn't fund the schools enough. Ours uses the funds raised for stuff like books ffs. That shouldn't be necessary bb

We don't have a fair. Children have a 'Christmas Shop' where they can buy tat presents and have them wrapped up. The money making bit comes from a disco. Big school so 4 separate sessions on one afternoon/evening, nearly all children go. (Not Christmassy, but what really makes the money is the firework display - that's big bucks, but not possible at many schools I grant you).

Wow, I'm amazed that some of you raise so much. We made £400 at our Christmas event at the weekend.

The chain parties actually works really well. Family are usually keen to donate and would rather have a nice meal in someone's house than trek to a cold hall and buy tat. They do have a shelf life. Older pupils even had tea parties and invited their friends which involved pupils. Honestly, they do work and they involve a lot of people.

who knows i NEED that pattern :)

I am left pondering how much people normally make on Xmas Fairs? Looks like 400-2000 but how much per pupil in school?

we usualy do between 2- 2.5k, 400 pupil primary.

6 Christmas fairs???

bearswithspecs we have 200 kids in the school. Actually made closer to £500. Over the year we raise about £4000, which I suppose isn't bad if you think of it £20 per child in the school, but which feels bad compared to other schools raising £14k+! We are not in an affluent area though.

6 Christmas fairs???

Our school is around 280 pupils and we did £2100 profit at our fair last week

£1k of that was solely raffle tickets - we have a £100 cash first prize on the raffle so it's very popular

We used to raise around £500 each fair (including the raffle) but have made a few changes over the last couple of years which have increased our profits massively - we've stopped selling pitches to outside traders at £10 a pop and that's made a massive difference. The £100 cash prize on the raffle has increased raffle takings from around £100 to £1k

snowflake pattern - there's an English (well American) translation if you scroll down. Sorry about thread hijack.

Interesting re the raffle prize.

Oops. The translation didn't help < is crap at crochet>

My eldest junior school did the during school and after event with years 5& 6 running most of the stalls, having a stall decorating competition judged by the head.

It meant the children got a lot more out of it, needed fewer helpers on the day etc.

our fair made £6k and we have 340 pupils. so really can't complain about the takings, I know it was a good result. strangely only £1600 on raffle though....much less than normal. I think it was a handy barometer, showing us exactly how fed up parents were with forking out on everything else.

Do you have a monthly "lottery"? It's has a limit to the number of members who set up a monthly direct debit. Maybe £2 and then there are 3 cash prizes monthly.

Birmingham - that's a massive amount. Would love to know what else on top of raffle makes lots. Is that taking into account all costs too? As for 6 Xmas fairs - that would be enough to kill anyone off !!!!

Ours made £4,500, 210 pupils plus nursery class. I think it has been less than that at the other three fairs this year.

Pesuming £4 grand averaged at each fair, and excluding nursery parents that works out at around £75 per child per annum. And that's not taking into account the fact that some parents don't come and then some families have more than one child.... it's a lot.

Our High School did a 40 hour labour raffle. Tickets were not cheap but they sold loads. The winner gets 40 hours of free labour. So 10 PTA members show up at your house and work for 4 hours each (or 8 work for 5 hours): cleaning, gardening, painting, anything none specialist. It is an amazing prize and earns a lot of money for one morning's work (if your PTA is big enough).

Not Christmassy though.

The primary school where I work do a Possum Purge which is our biggest fund raiser - people pay to enter a team, they shoot/trap as many possums over three nights as possible and the fur is plucked and sold. There are lots of great (donated by businesses) prizes for everyone. However I live in NZ, so it is very country specific!