We have sold Entertainment Books for the past 3 years. Last year our school of 700 got to 1500 books. We did get 50% profit from that. Our parents love it. We are going to do Sally Foster this year also. We were told not to do them together if at all possiable. We want to make as much with each as possiable. We were told that the books went up this year $5. I am not sure it will make that much difference. The wrist bands that they have given the kids and the stickers...are a big hit. We love our rep and she has bent over backwards to help us out. There are so many cute contest and ideas to running a really good fundraiser. I think the key is getting all the extras they offer and putting them into place in the school. We are running a lot of contest and cute little extras through the fundraisers. I think this will push our sales up.
We're trying the entertainment books for the first time this year too. We were pretty excited after attending the luncheon that Sally Foster/Entertainment Books provided and we quickly signed up due to how impressed we were with everything. I felt after all things were said and done that we had been mislead on a few things. The big thing was the Entertainment Books profits. At the luncheon they talked over and over about how we received 50% of the profit and the books sold for $5 less than retail. Well, come mid-summer we found out that there is a scale which is made up of # books sold and what the percentage is that you receive. We have a relatively small school that has always had low participation in fundraisers. Even if every child in our school sells 1 book, we are still only at the 30% profit margin. Then we found out the books sale price increased by $5 for our area. So we had been telling everyone that our books would be sold for $20 instead of the $25 retail and now we have to distribute them at a higher price. I'm sure there are things we could have done better while going through the contract but I just don't think it was presented very honestly to us in the first place. We're hopeful though!! We're trying to promote it as much as possible in our community!!
This is somewhat anecdotal, because I was not personally involved, but here's what I know. Our elementary school tried it for the first time last fall in conjunction with selling Sally Foster giftwrap (the two have the same parent company, I believe). Everyone was given one book to show to people, and they were supposed to either turn it in, or turn in the money for it. They ran it with a pretty short campaign time--just under two weeks (the wrapping paper campaign stays open for about 6 weeks). It was a fairly big hassle to get some of them back, but given the number of students involved, the number was relatively small (where there was a problem)--I want to say that it was less than 20, which would put it in the neighborhood of slightly less than 5%. I didn't hear about any problems at all with the people from Entertainment in terms of customer service, fulfillment, etc.
I know it was more successful than anyone expected, and they are planning on doing it again this year.
Are any of you selling the Entertainment Passbooks (the big coupon books) this year? Or have you had recent experience with them?
I always BUY one from some fundraising group or another, but this year our cheerleaders are considering selling them.
I'd appreciate any insight, feedback, ideas for success.
Our cheerleaders got invited to a state or regional competition later this year. That - of course - means extra funds need to be raised. As many of you know, there are SO MANY fundraisers in middle school. Ugh. At least with these coupon books, it's really easy to get the purchase price back in actual value if you just use a couple coupons.
