Fundraising recipe book

[Stripelover]

I'm a newbie member of our PTA and have said I'll look into organising a school recipe book to raise funds, but not sure if it's a money spinner or not! Any advice on best printing companies to use? Top tips? Forget it and run for the hills?! ...

Oh, if your school is diverse, I would like a recipe book introducing lots of ethnic/speciality simple easy to cook food by those native parents.

Make sure you know the origin of the recipes so can check for any copyright issues.

I’ve bought two of these types of cook book before - one was simply A4 paper folder in a card cover, the other a spiral bound thing with slightly shiny pages, and I think it stood up somehow. The second one looked much more professional and had more sales I think, not just within the school, but local bookshops as well. Both just used local printers to the schools I think. I expect there are companies that do this nationally, but maybe local ones are cheaper.

Our secondary school did one in house, used good quality A4 paper, and spiral bound it with an attractive cover. It has 110 pages! There is an index and the pages are colour coded for starters, main courses etc. Obviously you need to know costs and then price it so you make money, but it was really popular.

The Head, teachers, parents and anyone connected to the school made recipe contributions but you cannot dragoon people into contributing if they don't want to so you may not get diverse recipes even if you want them. We didn't sell adverts in it, but you could consider this to help with costs, and you could definitely look at a local printing company having advertising space in it if they do you a good price.

It went on sale at the Christmas Fair so reached a wider audience. A local bookshop, owned by a parent, stocked it too. As I was not on the committee at the time, I am not sure how much money it made, but each contributor was asked to submit a little bit about their recipe (like you see in a professional cookery book) and flyers went out asking for contributions. It is quite a job collating everything and checking you are not repeating essentially the same recipe, but the end result was good and still used in our house! It was seen as a good thing to do by the school because, hopefully, it promoted a strong school community and the school wrote a section about healthy eating and cooking classes at the school. Promoting a cohesive school community is an aim of most schools and PTAs so it can demonstrate they are doing something positive!

DC's old infants did one. It didn't really sell. I think it depends on your school ...

We did this years ago. The children wrote to local firms and asked if they wanted an ad in it. Local firms paid for ads and the children drew them. We made a lot of money from the ads. The charge was small about £10 but some business donated more.
We asked for recipes and one lady put in loads and some didn't so lots of hers😕

Oops posted too soon.
It was A5 and stapled. It was a £1 and we sold loads because it was cheap.Some other schools must have seen it and improved the idea. Ring bound and a hard glossy cover with a plastic sheet over top. The first one was about £5 and they persuaded the local bookshop to stock it and used some local recipes so attractive to tourists.they did very well.good luck I would say go ahead but you'll need to get cracking if you want it out for Chritmas. A few local celebrities contributed to ours.the children wrote to them.