Question: how many tickets per game??/

our fall carnival is coming up we are pre-selling our tickets @5 for $1 our games are 1-4 tickets if you play all 40 games it will take 101 tickets some of the moms are saying I am charging to many tickets for the games?? last year our carnival only made $400.00 after cost they can also donate food items and get free tickets(5) how do you figure how many tickets to charge per game??/

Asked by lfparish

Answers:

Advice from PTO Today

Craig writes:
Your cost per game doesn't sound out of line, but you might consider a wristband option that allows kids to play all of the games for one discounted price, say $12-$14. One thing worth doing is to figure out how many games on average each child is playing. Even if you didn't track things that way, you can get a rough idea by dividing the total number of tickets sold by the average number of tickets you charged per game (2.5). Then divide that number by the estimated number of kids who attended. For example, if you sold 5,000 tickets, divided by 2.5 is 2,000. If you had 400 kids in attendance, then each child on average took part in 5 games (2,000 divided by 400). In that case you know you have a lot of room to get kids more interested in the games. On the other hand, if kids participated in 30 games each, then you know that there's not a lot of room to make more money on your existing games. You need to either boost attendance or find another revenue stream like more concessions, a bake sale, spiritwear sale, or even a silent auction. You could also add more games, but 40 sounds like plenty.

Community Advice

lrgodoy writes:
I also think your amount of tickets per game sounds reasonable. One thing we like to keep in mind at our carnival is that the cost of the big prize should be more than the amount to play the game. For example, if you have a ring toss over 2 litre soda bottles and the prize is the soda bottle you don't want to charge $1.00 worth of tickets and the prize is only worth $1.00. Especially since most people will not "win". We usually have consolation prizes of small pieces of candy for those who don't actually "win".

Community Advice

kat.taylor writes:
I do not understand charging different ticket prices. We charge one ticket for every game. The better prizes are won at the harder games. We also have an auction which allows us to keep our game prices down. Kids are able to play every game for a reasonable price.