A simple fundraiser I am going to try this year is a scrapbook crop. we will use the school cafeteria and I will charge $10 per table. I am going to have parents donate goodies and find out if I can get some local scrapbook stores to donate some packets of supplies to use as door prizes, game prizes. Unless we have to buy some of the prizes this should be a free fundraiser so I am very excited about it.

Every year we have a cook-out at a local grocery store. The store will let us run a bill till the end of the cook-out then we can pay the bill with the cash made. We bring a grill and put up signs. We sell pork chop sandwiches, brats and hotdogs. You can add chips and a can of pop and make it a meal. Our net over 2 days of sales is about $600.

Don't forget the fundraisers you can have at local restaurants or amusement places (like skating rinks). It's not usually a LOT of funds, but low effort and pretty easy to pull off.

I'm talking about the ones where you set up a designated night for your school, promote it to school families, and the business gives you a percentage of the proceeds (like 10%) from sales that night.

McDonalds, Chick-Fil-A, pizza places, skating rinks, bowling centers ... lots of places are willing to do this.

Don't forget to approach businesses in your community. If you have a specific program and can put together a nice little packet to use, you can approach companies for funding. Many corporations have community investment foundations that look for programs that improve education.

Thank you all for the ideas. I do like the Hat and PJ day idea. That 1 may work around here. As for membership fees. As of right now, there are only 6 members of the PTO. I am working to get more by offering kid friendly incentives, i.e., no homework pass for the child if parent goes to meeting, we think if we can GET them to a meeting then we can do the rest.

you could talk to your school principal about having a PTO/PTA Fun Friday and charge $1 for the kids to participate and we also give them a small peice of candy for participating. We do pajama day, wacky hair day, hat day. for some reason the pj's and hat day go off better than all the rest. We do this on the first friday of every month. our first one was $122 and we have a student body of 182 kids. Not bad for the first one.
If your interested, I can send you the letters that we use to send home to the parents as reminders and we also have the very first one saved where we were telling them about it.
Good luck