A couple more things I just thought of. We have a PTA bulletin board where we have extra sales fliers available and the monthly due date is posted. I also put up what our monthly profit is and what it was last year for the same time period. If we're low on sales I'll put a HELP! sign next to it and also in the faculty lunch room. Several of our faculty and staff order every month.
We just finished our last Market Day sale this past Tuesday. We have a semi-rural, fairly affluent school of about 300 students. This year we will have made a profit of @ $4,700. We do 8 sales a year (Oct - May) and had 40 families buy at all the sales. What made a huge difference for us this year was getting our average sale over $3,800 so we could make the 15% profit instead of the 10% profit.
Along with the order forms, our chair sends out a half page note mentioning the specials and the deadline. We send in all of our orders over the internet and that extends our deadline a bit. We have a parent that calls frequent buyers the day before the deadline to remind them if they haven't placed an order.
To spark interest for new customers we offer coupons and a list of the most popular items. At every sale we have cash and carry as well as food sampling. There's also free samples at back to school night that most people attend. We do our pick-up from 3:30 - 4:30. I know that sounds strange since so many people work traditional jobs but it works for us. Many people pick up friends and neighbors orders. We also have a good amount of people that don't go to our school but still order.
I've heard people that have done md at other schools comment on how easy it is to pick up an order at our school. We have about 10 regular volunteers that work every sale. We unload the truck and "pick" the orders. We write the customers name on the outside of the box and then put them in rough alphabetical order on the floor. As soon as that's done we double check every order. When customers start coming in we quickly get their boxes on a table to pick up once they've paid. This is our 5th year doing market day and I think we've gotten it down pretty well.
Ser - thanks for the feedback! I was thinking no one had an opinion on this topic.
We have about 750 students and bring in about 3,500 a year. I'm not complaining as that is pretty good, but with anything, it can be improved on (just not sure how). Thanks again!
Hi! We do Market day and we do not do anything other then send home the flyers & reminders. I do not know what the % of participating families is, but we earn about $1200 a year. I know that October & November are the biggest selling months for us. We continue it mainly because we have a woman who is willing to run it and since there is someone willing why turn away the money. It is not a windfall, but every bit helps. We are also a middle class, two parent town. We have about 300 children in our school.
What are others doing to promote Market Day and to increase familiy participation. We currently provide the flyers home, reminders, specials (free food), etc, but it has been about the same amount of orders for a couple years. About 8 percent of our families order each month, which seems low since we are primarily middle class, 2-parent households (or is that in line with other schools?).
