Thank you Mandi for your advice. We are a very small community and our local business are not willing to donate much or even at all, they are doing there best in our area to just stay open. We have since had a meeting and have decided to go forward with the spaghetti dinner/dance idea. would like to here from any of you that have already done this if it worked out since this a K-5th grade school? Concerned parents may not be interested in bringing their child to a dance.
Your best bet is to contact local businesses and retailers. If you go to the Ultimate Donation topic you will see where many of us have had successes. These are primarly national companies and ones who seem to support everyone in some capacity.
Overall the easiest ones to get are local restuarants and signed books from authors.
You may want to check out the Bidding For Good Website which is an online company that we use, and take a look at some of the current auctions that support education. Bidding For Good also offers many items that you can upload on consignment.
I have found that mailing out letters has been the least successful. Attaching a letter on a personal e-mail has been the most successful. It appears everyone reads the e-mails while snail mail might be ignored.
PLANNING A SPAGHETTI DINNER FOR OUR SCHOOL THIS YEAR INSTEAD OF A CARNIVAL. I LIKE THE IDEA OF STILL HAVING A SILENT AUCTION BUT HOW WERE YOU ABLE TO GET BUSINESS TO DONATE WITH TODAYS ECONOMY? NEED ANY IMPUT.
That is part of why we charge a lower price for advance tickets on a majority of our events. Such as... the spaghetti dinner could be $5 advance or $8 at the door. Something along those lines. We have parents that then by tickets, who normally wouldn't, to save a few bucks.
The one downfall that we have seen is that parents are then less likely to actually show up the night of, if something changed in their schedule, if they have to pay more. It isn't a large enough loss compared to the planning costs/expenses that the presales help with though, at least not at this point.
In the past we did it all one cost and then basically doubled our presale amount for our final "figure" for planning purposes. Surprisingly that worked out almost perfect every year.
I am the PTO president at our school and our board has discussed a few times having a Spaghetti dinner. My concern is not around the preparation of the food but around the attendance. Our school has never had success in getting parents to purchase tickets a head of time, it has always been a show up at the door event even when we ask them to purchase ahead of time. How have some of you been able to accomplish this?
Hi, We have a spaghetti dinner at our school every year. The teachers and staff actually serve the food, that's the part the kids love. They do take reservations and if I remember it is about $20 for a family of five or $5.00 a person. Orders are taken when you make the reservation, that way the dinner is ready for your group when you arrive. We have kids that don't like sauce so they perfer plan noodles. Then teachers bring you your dinner, drink and sliverware.
That same night we have our anaul Art festival. So we go have dinner and see our kids art work trhough out the school. The kids decorate the placemates that they use at the dinner as well.
