Low-effort fundraising ideas

Automatically generated from the audio, so it may not be perfectly word-for-word.

Hi, welcome to the PTA Podcast. My name is Yvonne and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. But I'm just one of thousands of volunteers up and down the country who all want to make a difference to their schools. PTAs are becoming even more crucial in UK schools to boost budgets, and I find it fascinating to talk to other volunteers about the different approaches they take. So please join me in this podcast to share information, generate ideas, debate issues, and celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. Hi there, welcome to episode 13 of the PTA podcast. And happy new year! Now it's 2024. Yes, I'm a bit late to the party on this one. I've had a very busy start to my year so far, but I wanted to ask you, did you make any New Year's resolutions for yourself or your PTA? I do normally make New Year's resolutions for myself, but I didn't make many this year. In fact, I only made one, which is probably the same one I make every year, which is to be less busy and stop jamming up my diary and adding too many things in one day that's sometimes actually physically impossible for me to do. So that is my New Year's resolution, and actually, so far I think it's gone quite well. So I only made this resolution because I've have a couple of things happening in 2024 already that I'm quite excited about, and I need to put my time and energy into those. So in fact, I desperately need to prioritise them actually because they are quite big things. So the first thing is that I have taken the plunge to run a half marathon this year. This is my first half marathon. I have never run as far as a half marathon before, the longest I've ever run as a 10K. Um, I do go out running quite a lot. I find that it really helps me clear my head. I have a very busy home life with three children and also being on PTA. Um, sometimes I just need to unravel my thoughts, and I find that running really helps me with that. I am probably the world's slowest runner, um, so I'm definitely going not going for times or anything. I'm just going out to get some space, to get some quiet. Um, I don't run with headphones or music or anything, I just like to listen to the noises around me. Um, and because I live in a village, there's always lovely bird song to listen to, so I like to have nice quiet time when I go out for my run. And um I signed it for a half half marathon to kind of give myself a goal of something to work towards, really, because I found that my running was not really going anywhere, so I signed it with a friend for a local half marathon, uh, and I need to therefore prioritize my training so that I can make sure I can make it across that finish line because I am determined to finish, even if I have to crawl across at the end because my legs are hurting so much. I definitely want to finish my half marathon. Um, the half marathon I'm aiming for is in mid-March, so I have had to really knuckle down and make sure I don't miss any training sessions on the plan that I'm following, and um because it's a half marathon distance, so a half marathon, in case you don't know, is 13 miles or 21 kilometres. Um, and so in the training runs, obviously, my runs have had to get longer and longer to try and get closer to that 21km distance, which means that my training runs were I would normally have gone out running for about an hour, and I would consider have considered that quite a long run. Um, my training runs now are an hour and a half, two hours, so uh you know I have to sort of make time to fit those in to my life. Uh it's going well so far. I think the fear of not being able to finish is what is actually spurring me on to do all my training sessions, but uh joking aside, I have actually enjoyed doing a bit more running, running a bit further. I've had to find some new running routes around my house. Um, so yeah, it's going well. And the second big thing happening this year in my family is that we're having quite a significant extension built onto the side of our house. In fact, the builders started about three weeks ago, and uh today, very exciting. We are expecting a concrete lorry to deliver our second load of concrete to concrete in the floors. So if you hear a loud lorry noise during this podcast, uh then you can be excited for me because that is my new layer of concrete arriving. Um so I've had to prioritise getting ready for the builders uh to come, and since they've been here, I think this is the third or fourth week they've been here now, I've had to um just kind of make sure I'm at home a little bit more than I would normally be. I also you know want to keep them topped up with tea and coffee because they're doing hot you know work outside and it's actually really cold and wet at the moment, and they're out there in all their waterproofs and waterproof trousers still carrying on. So I just want to make sure I'm here if there's any decisions that need to be made or uh they need another cup of tea. Um, and also I'm trying to remove things from my house um in boxes because whilst we're having um a bit more of the house built on the side, they're also later on in the plan are coming inside the house to um remodel some of the rooms. Um, and so at that point they're basically going to be everywhere in my house, and my house is going to be covered in that horrible dust that you get on a building site. So I'm trying to just take things out of my house and we're putting them in storage just while the building work's carrying on. In fact, this is something I was supposed to do back in September. Um, and I never prioritised it properly, and because most of my spare time goes on PTA events, I haven't actually done the job I was supposed to do, which is clear out the clutter, and so now I'm having to clear out the clutter, and it's it's just it just has to happen. I have to make time for it. There is no excuse not to do it because it's happening right now. So, because I have these two big things in my life going on, I have had to rethink how my PTA work is going to be this year. I had to make a decision about that, and I realised with those two things happening that I'm going to have to rein in some of the activities that we we originally had planned for term three because I just basically wouldn't be able to do it. Um, this does reflect actually how my PTA is organised and how it's run. Um, I know many PTAs are different to this, but uh the way that mine seems to be run, um and I'm saying seems to be run, I am the chair, I do get to sort of make make decisions about these things, but the way that um it seems to be most successful, shall we say, is that as chair I'm definitely the leader in the team, and so in order to get things done, that energy um I think has to come from me, and so um I did uh let my fellow teammates know that you know I have these two big projects, and basically I wouldn't be as available to help with PTA things as normal. So normally I'm the one that leads each event, and then the others come on board when necessary, or if I you know have a few jobs to do, I will ask people to take on those jobs. But definitely the the main leader in every event is always me. Um, and so I asked them if anybody would like to um take over the event we had planned in term three, which was going to be a quiz night for parents, which we haven't run before, and we thought might be nice to do something a little bit different. Uh, we hadn't really added in any details, we just thought we might like to try one. So there wasn't any work that had already been done. We didn't have any questions, we didn't we didn't even know the format, like whether it was going to be in person in the school hall or online. We didn't um have any prizes or anything. So obviously, there was a lot of work to do to get the quiz night up and running. Um, and originally we'd planned to do that work in term three and then hold the quiz night at the end of term three. So I asked my PTA if somebody else could lead it because everyone was quite positive about actually having the quiz night, but unfortunately, um nobody felt able to step up uh at the meeting that we had just after Christmas. So we decided for term three and term four that we would just go with really easy fundraising ideas, hopefully just to keep um the money rolling in and the sort of fun events ticking over for the children and some events um for the parents as well. Then it got me thinking that we all, all of us on the PTA, always need easy fundraising ideas. So I thought in this episode I could tell you about my easy fundraisers or the ones that I think are quite straightforward and that work in my school. Uh, and maybe you could let me know if you have any additional ones that have worked in your school because it's always great when we can pool ideas, especially ideas that don't require a lot of time and effort in our busy PTA lives. So drop me an email on hello at ptapodcast.com and I can share um some other ideas with the listeners next time. So the first two easy fundraisers that I am going to share with you are our bread and butter at Might PTA. So if we ever feel the need to raise a bit of money, these are our go-to fundraisers: low effort, low cost, uh low time. So the first one is, as I'm sure you all know, is uh non-uniform days. So this year, I'm not sure if I've mentioned this uh previously and one of my podcasts in September, but this year we have agreed a programme with school of non-uniform days, and uh our school suggested that we run one um on the last day of each term, so that gives us six opportunities per year to have a non-uniform day. They felt that um this was beneficial for the children um and more inclusive for each child, because sometimes when the children go in non-uniform, some children um can be feel a bit uncomfortable going to school without their uniform on, and so because the last day of term, especially um before the Christmas, Easter, and summer holidays, because that last day of term is a little bit special and you know the kids are off timetable or whatever, not doing their normal activities, it's already a bit of a different day. So the head of school suggested that we keep our non-uniform days to the last day of term just to help out any child that was feeling a bit uncomfortable about coming in uh non-uniform clothes, and we thought that was a great idea because it very clearly gives us a set um date for each term for the non-uniform day, and um it's also a bit of fun on the last day of term just to make that last day a little bit special. So um we've run lots of non-uniform days over the past few years, and we have a little list of different themes that we keep kind of rotating if you like, and our most popular ones with the children at school are things like crazy hair day. So we've got crazy hair day coming up at the end of this term, actually, term four. Um, and so what we always say on a non-uniform day is we say come in non-uniform if you want to, and also you could come in with crazy hair. So, obviously, not everybody might feel comfortable doing something crazy with their hair, but they're still welcome to come in non-uniform. Um, another one we have tried, actually tried for the first time last year was a PJ Day or pajama day. Um we asked the children to come in in their nightwear, uh, maybe with slippers. Um, actually, maybe not with slippers. I'm not sure what happened about the slippers actually, um, but also a onesie or a dressing gown. Um, although lots lots didn't do the onesie or dressing gown because I think we did that in the summer, so it was actually quite warm. Uh, and what was really nice as well is the teachers also came in in their PJs or version of their PJs, anyway, so that was really cool. Then we have sometimes we just go for a normal non-uniform day, which is just your bog standard, it's a non-uniformed day, just wear clothes from home, so that's just a kind of basic one, um, but also quite nice, I think, so that doesn't put pressure on anybody choosing you know their favourite pajamas or trying to think of crazy hair or anything, it's just a just a casual one, and then um at the opposite end of the casual non-uniform day, I would say is the break the rules day, which I know some PTAs um really get a great response to. So, this is where you organise a list of rules, school rules, that the children can break by paying um an amount of money. So we did this for the first time last year, and we came up with nine uh school rules that we wrote on a poster, and it was things like don't come to school wearing nail varnish, or don't bring uh juice or squash in your water bottle, and don't bring a sugary snack for break, and uh what else do we have? Don't wear odd shoes to school, that kind of thing. So we made a list of school rules, and then we said for each rule you would like to break, it costs 50p, and you can break as many as you want. So if actually maybe it wasn't nine, maybe it was six. I think it was six because I don't think we would have asked for four pounds fifty. No, it must have been six. Um, and so that was great actually, because normally we asked for a donation of a pound for when it's uh non-uniform day, but on Break the Rules Day, people can donate more if they want to, so that is a good extra little fundraiser there, and the kids absolutely loved it. I heard uh some of the children planning um the whole week before Break the Rules Day, which rules they were gonna break and how they were going to break them, and oh I just love it when I hear children talking about PTA events and the fact that they're planning what they're gonna do, you know, means they're excited and anticipating it, and that that's just that's just music to my ears. So um, if you haven't tried a Break the Rules Day, I highly recommend having a go. Um, I did sit down with the head of school to discuss it and just make sure that the ideas that we had um were going to be okay with the school. Um, so I did go in with a list of 12 ideas, and together we picked um six that would work for the children and work for the school. Um, so that was good. Um, so yes, in terms of uh money, as I said, we normally just charge £1, or we welcome a £1 donation for children to come in non-uniform. We have had a little trouble this year with collecting very small donations. Um our school has moved to a different finance system for parents, and there are charges now on there were quite high charges actually on um debit card payments. So I think for a debit card payment, something like it was a percentage charge, but also a 20p charge as well. Um, and obviously, when people are donating a pound, that's a fifth of your money just gone down the drain. So for the non-uniform days that just cost the pound, we have actually been trying to collect cash in the playground, um, just as the children are being dropped off, which hasn't actually gone very well, unfortunately. Um so we have about 85 children in the school, and we've been taking about £50, £55. Um, and I was hoping that there would be a bit more, but anyway, that's that's what we had to kind of do so we didn't have to swallow that 20p charge. Um and for Break the Rules Day, because that's likely to be a bit more, I think we will collect the money for that from our school finance system, so we're less kind of stung by the charges there. So non-uniform days are a great way to kick off any sort of fundraising. You can link them to a topic that your school is doing, or you can link them to a particular holiday around the year. I mean, there's you know, hundreds, thousands probably of different holidays, and then we have all the special days that seem to be popping up everywhere now, like National Eater Sausage Roll Day or something. I don't know. That's just like I think you can get a list of those special days um from some websites. So if you wanted to run a non-uniform day and you wanted to give it a theme just to make it a bit different, then you could always link it to something else, um, which makes it more fun. And so the work involved in a fundraiser of a non-uniform day obviously is picking the date, picking the theme, if applicable, of your non-uniform day, advertising it, and then collecting the money, and that's all you have to do. So it's very straightforward and definitely achievable by one person on your PTA. So um, you know, if you if you're a PTA that allocates jobs to different people, perhaps one of your um committee could be a non-uniform day organizer or something, it's a really nice kind of little packaged up job for somebody. And the second, I would say, bread and butter uh fundraiser, easy fundraiser for our school is a cake sale or a bake sale. Again, just like the non-uniform days, it is an easily repeatable event that you can do throughout the year. You could do one every term or every other term, and the beauty of a cake sale, well, there's two things actually that make a cake sale really good. First of all, you're asking for donations of cakes from parents, so you you do not have to purchase the things that you are then selling back to the parents. Um, and the second thing about a cake sale, uh, which I didn't really appreciate before I joined the PTA was that people buy more than one cake. So in our school of 85 children, when I started out in the PTA, I thought cake sale, oh well, yeah, I suppose we might make £80 from a cake sale based on the fact that each child buys one cake for one pound. But no, when I started to do uh the cake sales, um I realised that some children will come in and buy five cakes. In fact, there was a little boy who did buy five cakes um and we had to package them up because he had to get home on the bus with all of these cakes that he had bought, um, which we did manage to do, so we'd managed to take them home, it was okay. But I didn't realise, and I don't know why I didn't realise, it's really stupid. Um, that people buy more than one cake. Some people might buy a cake to take home for a younger sibling or for a granny or for a parent, or they might just want two themselves. So um, so never go into a cake sale thinking it's just one cake per child because it just won't be, and that's why they are so lucrative because obviously the things you're selling are all donated, so all the money 100% is profit, which is great. Uh, so the way we organise it is we pick a date, um, it's generally straight after school, um, and it's all over in about gosh, don't know, 20 minutes, half an hour. Obviously, again, my school is very small, so we have we do have a queue, but it does move quite quickly. Um, so we ask for cake donations from the parents a week or two in advance. We do do a couple of reminders um because you know people forget, and then we do also ask parents to provide the cakes. Um Uh with a list of ingredients. So if they have made them at home, they just need to bring a list of ingredients. And obviously, if they're shop bought, they just need to provide the packaging so that we can uh see the ingredients. And um then we normally sell the cakes for a pound each, unless they're particularly small ones, in which case we do 50p. So we just judge that on the day and on the sale, because we never really know which cakes we're going to get yet. Um so again, your cake sale, just like the non-uniform days, you could have a theme. So, for example, you could have a Valentine's Day cake sale, you could have a Christmas bake sale, you could have a summer picnic cake sale or something. Um, or it can link to a topic at school, you could have a World Book Day cake sale, um, anything like, or just you know, normal let's just have some cake cake sale. Uh, sometimes in the past we have had so much cake left over from a cake sale, we have run another cake sale the next day. Uh, so you can make quite a lot of money from them. And the work involved in a cake sale is kind of similar to the non-uniform days in that it's picking a date, advertising to parents, manning a stall for 30 minutes and then clearing up afterwards, which really isn't very much tidying up, probably about five minutes. Um, if you have a lot of cake, then you will need to possibly store it somewhere to do another cake sale the next day. Um, or you might just return the cakes to parents. I guess it depends when the sale is. We tend to do our sales on a Thursday just so that we can get cakes and containers back to parents on the Friday. Sometimes we do them on Friday, um, in which case we would try and return things on the Monday. Um, I guess it just depends if it's linked to a particular topic or theme or if it's on the last day of term or something when you need to get it sorted out. But again, cake sale is easily repeatable throughout the year. You can theme it, the cakes um are donated, so there's no outlay from your PTA, just a little bit of time, um, and it's a good moneymaker. So if you have a new PTA and you're just starting out and you're not really sure what you can do, and the thought of organising a summer fair or an Easter egg hunt really scares you because they because you haven't done it before, then let me recommend to you that you just kickstart your fundraising with a non-uniformed day and a cake sale, and away you go. You'll get a bit of money in the bank, and people will start to um understand who you are and what you do. You can start talking to parents. It's a great way to kind of introduce a new PTA, I think. Right, another relatively easy fundraiser is signing up to a scheme called Easy Fundraising, or one word. Um, the work here for your PTA is a lot of advertising and reminding to parents, but you don't but apart from that, you don't actually have to do anything once your PTA is set up on the website. Um, it's very easy to set up your PTA uh on the Easy Fundraising website, and the way it works is that when your parents um buy things online, then the and they go sort of through this company. Um the retailer that they're purchasing from will donate a small percentage of the value of goods that your uh parent is buying to your PTA, and it's normally um between 0.5%, maybe 5% up to 5%, um, depending on the online retailer. They easy fundraising has over 8,000 um online retailers signed up to its scheme. This does not include Amazon, before you ask, but it includes most major high street stores and other big um retailers online. It also includes holiday companies, insurance companies, all the major supermarkets. So if you do online shopping, you can earn money for your PTA every time you shop online. Um, it has um a huge variety of retailers on there. And basically the way it works is that when you shop online, you either go through the Easy Fundraising website or you can set up a little icon on your internet browser that when you go to a website it will flash up. If that website provides a donation to your PTA, you just click on the little reminder, say accept donation, and then you just shop in the normal way. It is very, very easy to do. Um, if your PTA is a member of uh Parent Kind, I think they have some webinars that can help you set up easy fundraising for your PTA, but easy fundraising themselves are often, as I'm sure you would expect, very keen to help new PTAs navigate um their website and understand how the process works and understand how you can get the most out of it. I understand from other PTAs that it can be extremely lucrative, particularly if you have a larger primary school. The more obviously the more people you get to sign up and actually use easy fundraising, the more money you can make. But you have the the kind of problem with it is you have to get people to make the effort to sign up, and then when they purchase things online, they have to make the effort to actually go through the easy fundraising website or the app or click on the uh donation reminder on their web browser. So you have to really show people that it's worth it, worth making the effort, and show them the benefits of doing it. Um, so we've been a member of this scheme for gosh, about three or four years possibly, and so far we have raised about £300 actually over the last two years with this, and we have about 10 regular people who use who donate via this method. Um, I am one of them. Um in fact I am I am happen to be the highest donator on easy fundraising, which I was a bit shocked at to start with because I don't actually buy loads online, um, but then I realized that I think the reason I am the highest donator is because I don't shop with Amazon. So I I made a personal decision a few years ago to not shop on Amazon because I wanted to support other retailers and British shops on the high street, so I decided not to shop on Amazon. So therefore, when I shop online, I'm actually shopping with retailers, and so therefore getting quite a lot of donations to my PTA kind of by accident. Um, but I think that's the reason that I am the highest earner in my school's easy fundraising, which is slightly embarrassing, but anyway, it makes me look like I buy loads of stuff, but I really don't. Um so unfortunately, we've only got 10 people who have signed up out of our school, and I really want it to be higher. And we have every so often put out another email reminding people about it, as I know it could be so much better, we could raise so much more money this way if only people would just read the stuff, take five minutes to sign up and sort it out on their laptop or whatever they need to do. Um, so so this style of fundraising does require effort from the parents, definitely more effort than just bringing a cake to a cake sale. But as the PTA, it involves if you haven't already, signing up to the scheme, which doesn't take very long, um, and then reminding parents and advertising to parents as much as you can to get people signed up, and it's kind of probably a constant reminder throughout the year, really, because you won't get everybody signed up to start with. People need to be reminded and persuaded that it's a good idea, and then of course, you will get all your new starters in September. Um, so uh you'll have to kind of do your advertising on a rolling program. Um, and uh that's kind of that's kind of it for easy fundraising. Uh I do feel at my school it's a bit of an untapped resource, and it's probably time that we put out another reminder about it. We do always remind people in November time, just because that's you know when people are starting to think about buying Christmas presents, so that's quite a good time to remind people about it. Um, but I definitely want to put a shout out about the fact you can um use it when you're paying for your weekly food delivery if you get a weekly delivery from a supermarket, and it would be such a shame to be missing out on those things when you know on the PTA every penny really does matter, and every penny goes back to your school. So um, yeah, check out easy fundraising. Um, they do send a lot of emails just to warn you. As when when your PTA email is set up, they do send a lot of emails, so you might have to update your preferences on that. Um, but it it is worth having a go, seeing how you get on. Maybe just decide to do it for a year in the first instance and just see how much money you raise, and then you can tell everybody, hey, guess what? You know, we raise this much in just one year at easy fundraising. If we've got more people on board, we could maybe double that amount. So um, yeah, so give that one a go. Um, I don't I I think I think that is just available in the UK. I don't know if there are similar schemes outside the UK for any listener in a different country. Um, yeah, I'm not I'm not sure what um what is available. Um, I know that Amazon used to run a programme called Amazon Smile, which is a similar thing, which donated a little bit every time you bought something off Amazon, but that is now discontinued, and as far as I know, um they don't have anything similar. Obviously, I'm not really on the ball with Amazon because I'm not an Amazon customer on a regular basis. Um, so if anyone does know of anything on Amazon, do let us know. But I I'm pretty sure that they've discontinued anything that gives in that way. Uh, but I don't know if they have any other charity, um charity charitable donation scheme. So, yes, do let me know if I uh don't know about that. Thank you. Okay, and the next uh easy fundraiser that I have on my list is a secondhand book sale. So this is actually really similar to a cake sale in the sense that all the books are donated from your school community. So when we have run these in the past, we have accepted adult books and children's books, um, and we get them donated just a few days before we actually want to do the sale so that we don't have any storage issues at school with lots of bags of books. Um, we again generally run this as an after-school sale, or sometimes we have it as a stall at uh you know one of our fairs or fates. Um, it's very straightforward. Um, you have to obviously do advertising to say when it's going to be and when people can donate books. You do need to put a little bit more effort in into kind of collecting those donations and leaving them somewhere. Then on the day of the sale itself, you will need to pop along possibly an hour or two beforehand just to put out the books on the table. Um, the cake sale we generally just rock up about 10 minutes before the sale and just put the cakes on the table. There's no sort of um nicely arranging the cakes, they're just there because they just sell so quickly. Obviously, with the books, you may want you'll well, you'll definitely want to separate children's from adults. Um, if you want to go a bit further with the children's ones, you can then have a paperback section, you could have a non-fiction section, you could sort by age. There's all sorts of variations you could do, and whether you want to display it like that, or whether you just want it to be a kind of rummaging sale where people can just come and have a look in a rummage, that's completely up to you. And whichever one you choose obviously will determine how much time before the sale you need to get to the school. Um, so the work for the PTA in this one obviously is advertising the sale, collecting the donations, setting up the sale, which can obviously be done on the day, holding the sale, um, and and then tidying up afterwards. The other thing you need to be aware of with a secondhand book sale is uh you need to have a plan for what to do with the books which haven't sold. So we had a situation um a few months ago where we did a secondhand book sale and we were inundated, I mean, literally inundated with books, and we sold lots of books on the day, but we sold uh we we donated so many books that it hardly looked like we'd sold any at all, and we were left with bags and bags of secondhand books. Um I mean we must have had at least 15 massive carrier bags, you know, those IKEA bags of full of heavy books. Um, and what we did was we divided those bags up between all the PTA committee, and we each made a little trip to a local charity shop to donate the uh books. Um I have heard that sometimes charity shops don't accept a lot of books, so you may wish to check that in advance. Um the other thing we tried to do with our leftover books was um we tried to look at the scheme that is run by WH Smiths where you can send books off and actually get paid for them. On their website, they have a um little box where you can type in the ISBN number or the barcode or something like that, and it will tell you whether they are accepting that particular book and if you can get any money for it. So I spent some time, uh I pulled out some random children's books and some random adults' books, and I spent half an hour putting numbers into this website, um, and none of the books that I put in were being accepted. So that's when we decided to take them all to the charity shop. Um, I'm not sure if there are any other book collection schemes going, um, but it might be worth checking um to see if you can offload books in that way and get some money for it. But we needed to definitely shift those bags out of the school because we have a small school and 15 IKEA bags full of books takes up quite a lot of space in the school hall, so um we had to sort of get rid of them quite quickly. At the sale itself, we tend to keep things very simple, and we just did 50p for one book to try and sell as many as we could. Obviously, selling books to children is great to encourage them to read, and it feels like a very wholesome uh fundraising activity, especially coming from a primary school. So we just have it as a really nice little everybody can join in fundraiser. Um, it is always really popular, it always shocks me how how popular a second hand book sale is, but I mean, I love going to a secondhand book sale and having a rummage because you just never know what books you might find and what might take your fancy and what books you might pay 50p for to just have a go at it. Um, so yeah, it is a really lovely um event to go to. So that would be a very again, very simple, quick turnaround um for your PTA. Again, if you're starting out as a PTA, this is another really nice one to you know get the school community to come together, talk about books, buy books. You could even, you know, make it a much bigger event. Actually, you could have a big book sale in your school hall, you could do tea and coffee as well, and have it as a bit of a social occasion if you wanted to, or alternatively, you can just do a quick book sale after school. So it's quite nice this one to have a think about how you might use it in your fundraising calendar. So I'm going to move on now. Um, still in the theme of easy fundraisers or low effort fundraisers, but we're just going to move on to some fundraisers which require just a bit more effort. So I would still class these as low effort, it's just they're more effort than a cake sale or a non-uniform day. So the one that I want to flag up first is the secondhand uniform sales. So I think I mentioned before that this is something that I feel I want my PTA to really push this year. Um, with the cost of living crisis and everybody wants to be a bit more sustainable. I think a secondhand uniform sale can really tick a lot of boxes for families. And what we have decided to do this year is we didn't really have the capacity within my PTA committee to allocate managing this role to an existing person, and I felt that to really make the most of the secondhand uniform, it would be so great to have either one person or ideally two people to manage this throughout the year. Um, we have put out secondhand uniform at events in the past, um, and the last time I got it out of the cupboard, which I think was October, um, and I put it out oh no, no, it was uh Christmas tea and coffee, that's right. So I we put it out at Christmas tea and coffee, and I I realised that some of the uniform looked quite drab. Um, some of it could have really done with a wash, um, and then it would have looked a lot better on the table, and that's when I thought, right, I really need to get somebody to be in charge of this. I felt it it's such a nice little package of a job, which is you know, collecting the donations, checking the donations, washing the donations, making sure it's sure it's all organised in the cupboard so that when we do have a second-hand uniform sale, it's easy just to get the boxes out, it's already arranged in size order, and I really wanted somebody to take that on as a job. So I advertised for two people to take this on. Um, school sent an email out for me, and I got two volunteers, which was really great. So I now have two people, they're not on my PTA committee, but that's that doesn't matter. Um, they're now in charge of the second hand uniform shop. So they ran their first one um in January, and what we decided to do was um, I think it was about two weeks before the sale, they started advertising for people for parents to donate uniform that they that their children had grown out of. So, one of the things we really need to uh push this year is to get parents used to donating the uniform that they no longer need, and then coming to buy the uniform the next size up. So that kind of cycle and exchange of uniform, we need to make that um oh, what's the phrase? Like a more regular occurrence and a more natural response, I suppose. Instead of people thinking, oh, I'll go to the shop to buy my uniform. I want them to think, oh, I'll just check in the non-uniform sale. Sorry, I keep calling it non-uniform, I mean secondhand uniform. I'll check in the secondhand uniform sale, and if I can't get it there, then I'll go to the shop. So I want their first port of call to be the secondhand uniform shop. So we um decided to have any uniform which has the school logo on as two pounds. And my school um you can get jumpers, hoodies, polo shirts, and sometimes little school coats, um, and sometimes um little school woolly hats with um the logo on. And obviously, people do buy polo shirts without the logo on, they um the girls' pinnacle dresses or the girls' summer dresses. Don't have the logo on. If there happens to be any boys' trousers or girls' trousers, they don't have the logo on. So we have differentiated between items with the logo and items without. So items with the logo, we're charging two pounds because they generally are more expensive. And items without the logo, we're charging one pound, and we're just keeping it really simple. We are keeping our prices very low to encourage people to come and shop there. And I think at the last sale we sold about £14 worth of second hand uniform, which I know you might think is a really really low amount. But as I said before, every little helps, and we are hoping to have these secondhand uniform sales every term, and so getting people used to coming to them is part of the uh challenge, and so you know, to get £14 in the first one I just think is great. That is 100% profit for the PTA. Um, so I'm not gonna say no to £14 at all. Um, I know that in much bigger schools, having a secondhand uniform sale will be a much much bigger job. Um, and I have seen pictures on Facebook of um some PTAs having a dedicated uniform shed or space at the school where they have beautiful rails of ironed polo shirts and jumpers and dresses and things, and that just looks absolutely fantastic. I mean, it looks like a proper shop, and um, I really hope that if you have one of those at your school, it's it's being really successful for you. Um, I don't think my school will ever quite get to that point, obviously, because we're quite small, and because we do rely on donations coming in, you know, we can only sell what's been donated. Um, so when you do go to the second town uniform sale, it's it's kind of a bit like potluck as to what's there and whether your child's size is there or whatever. But um again, it's you know a little social occasion, parents come in, they have a little browse, they might chat to other parents, so that is also something that the PTA events can do, is just to bring people together. We run our second time uniform sales um again straight after school, but with these ones, we actually open the sale um about half an hour before the end of school to allow parents to arrive early and just go in and have a look for uniform without having to drag their children in, um, and that's been quite successful. So, if you have somebody who's going to run the sale for you, just making sure they can start the sale a little bit earlier, I think is a really great idea. We also have um our card machine at the uh secondhand uniform sale because people do buy more than one item. Obviously, if there's something there, then they will want to buy that. So it is good to have um card payment there if you can. My PTA just has one card machine, so um, but that's fine because we're not inundated with um a massive QR secondhand uniform sales. So, yeah, we do card or cash, it's absolutely fine. Uh, we don't have a list of uh secondhand uniforms anywhere, it's literally just turn up on the day and see what's for sale. Before each sale, we will do an extra push to get extra donations in, and like I said, I'm hoping to do one per term, so um, to really get people into the mindset of using the sale. So, the work for the PTA, or basically the people in charge of the second hand uniform sale, is um picking the date, advertising. So, you've got two types of advertising to do for this event. You have to advertise to receive donations, get parents to donate in advance, and then obviously advertising for people to actually attend the sale. Once donations have been received, obviously, there will be sorting through to make sure that um only suitable items go into the sale. I always think it's a good idea to wash everything, even if it even if you think it's been washed, just wash it again, um, and and really try and get everything looking as good as it can for the sale because obviously, people, even if they're buying second-hand uniform, they still want to buy decent, good quality second-hand uniform. So making it look its best is is really important. And then obviously, there's the sale itself. Um, depending how big your school is, you might need to rope in a few extra volunteers. You need to consider how long it's going to take you to set all the clothes out, and in this case, I would definitely arrange by age because that's what people are going to be looking for. We didn't have access to our school hall when we ran our second-hand uniform sale, so we actually laid it out in the library. We actually cleared some shelves of books and used the shelves to have all the uniform folded on the shelves, and then stuck up some signs with a bit of blue-tack indicating which section was which age, and actually, I think that looked really fantastic because everybody could easily see what was on the shelves. So, if you're looking for a jumper, obviously you went for the right colour of that section. Um, and the same with the polo shirt, so it was really easy, and and we want to make it easy for people to just pop in, grab a jumper, hopefully, if it's got this right size, and then and then go and pick up their child, basically, is what we're hoping for. Um, so yes, uh, we are hoping to run them more often. Um, it's it's not too much work, and I think if you can get a couple of people who are prepared to really manage your secondhand uniform, then I think it could potentially be a really good fundraiser for your school. So I would definitely have a go at your secondhand uniform sale if you haven't already done so. Right, moving on to the next low effort uh fundraising idea is to have an external stall holder come to your school and sell whatever it is they sell, whether it's edible things or non-edible things, and then your PTA gets a slice of the profits that that person makes on the day. So we tried this for the first time at our annual sports day uh last summer. We often just sold tea and coffee, um, instant coffee, just a tea bag, you know, bog standards, uh, hot drinks. Um, and somebody suggested getting a coffee van to come to Sports Day, which we had never thought of before. Um so we did a bit of investigation, managed to find a local guy who um when I contacted him um and suggested in an email very bravely, because it's actually quite a hard thing to ask somebody, or I I find it hard anyway, to share some of his profits back to the PTA. He was more than happy to say yes. So we actually booked um him to come to our sports day. So he was at our school from about 11am until about 4 pm because we had a little event after sports day. We had our colour run after sports day, so people were still hanging around. So he was there for a good solid five hours, and he very kindly donated 15% of his profit on the day from selling coffees, hot drinks, and actually some um of those oh like I want to say frappuccino, but that's not really the right word. Iced coffee, that's what I'm trying to think of, and smoothies, um, all sorts of things. He had a whole load, a whole massive menu of all the different things that people could order, so it was actually really exciting. Um, and we made uh £60 from him coming to our sports day. Now, £60 obviously is not very much money, but I think that is more than we would have made if we had um done you know the tea and coffee ourselves. Um, because I don't think we would have sold 60 cups of not very good tea and coffee, whereas he was doing a killing with all his stuff. Um, so the effort required if you wanted to book an external stall holder, obviously you have to find somebody, um, make the booking with them, ask them or negotiate with them if they would donate some money to your PTA. Um, and then obviously check the paperwork because you need to make sure that they have uh public liability insurance if they're coming onto the school grounds, so you need to do some little checks like that. But a reputable storeholder should or van person should um be familiar with all of those things. Um, and then obviously the extra work is just really then once you've made the booking, it's actually just to advertise and advertise and advertise to the parents so that um they know it's happening, they can come along prepared um to to buy coffee or hot drinks on the day, or if it's somebody selling books or somebody selling cakes or something. Um I mean, there's so many people out there that that might be happy to come to your school and do a little stall. Um, and so yes, the work after you've made the booking, the work is just the advertising. Then obviously on the day, it's good to have somebody from the PTA, a named person, that will welcome that stall holder, show them where everything is that they need, um, and and then obviously pop over every so often, make sure they're okay, do they need anything, do they need any help with anything? Um, and then kind of say bye to them at the end, and then just follow up with them afterwards about seeing how they got on and when they and giving your uh PTA bank details so they can make the transfer of whatever you agreed. So that is a very easy fundraiser. Um obviously it's not a massive one. Perhaps you're if you're in a bigger school, it would make more of an impact. For us, it wasn't a massive fundraiser, but it did raise some money. As I've said before, every little helps. And actually, what it did for us was as well as raising a tiny bit of money, is it set a lovely atmosphere at our sports day, and um actually the guy who had the coffee van had a massive queue for most of the day. I think it was a really special treat for everybody, including the teachers who wanted coffee as well to get them through sports day, so I was queuing up quite a lot getting coffee for the teachers. Um, but it it was lovely and a special treat for everyone. Parents were buying things for their kids from him uh as well because he did smoothies and um other soft drinks, so it was a nice addition, and obviously he provided something that we couldn't provide from the PTA. We had looked into doing slushies, but a slushy machine is really expensive and needs setting up a few hours before so it can freeze, and there's there were quite a few hurdles with the slushy machines that we as a quite small PTA we just couldn't overcome those. So actually bringing somebody in to do that was a really great idea. Um, again, I think sometimes small schools might not be able to entice a food van or a drinks van or whatever over to them, but um certainly if you're in a bigger school, that would be um quite welcome, I'm sure. The only snag would be um thinking about the cues of people because obviously, if people are in a queue at the food van or the coffee van, they're not spending money. Um, and so it might be worth asking or checking with the person, the vendor, how they would manage the cues. Like, do they have more than one person serving, for example, that kind of thing? Um, just something to be aware of, really. But no, um, we haven't actually done any other type of external stall holder. So, for example, I know that you can run book fairs. Uh, some people can come in and run a book fair at your school. My school sometimes uses um the scholastic book fair um where they actually deliver some books in bookshelves that come on wheels, it's very clever. Have never seen them arrive, so I'm not quite sure if they come in a van or what, but um but yeah, they make a little bookshop and then you can sell uh books, and then however many books you sell, I think it's either a point system or a percentage system, you get that much to spend on books for your school library. And obviously, there are the Usborne reps who will do a similar um deal for you. So, um, yeah, probably pays to have a little shop around, have a look around, think about what your parents would actually be prepared to spend. Um, I know, for example, I've already talked about cake sales. So I know, for example, our school was approached by a um cake shop um in a local town who wanted to come and bring a cake van after school and sell their cakes. Um, but we actually decided not to go for that because our cake sales are so popular and we keep our prices really low and it's a hundred percent profit for us, whereas their cupcakes were at least £3, if not more, and they were offering us 10% of their profits, so it wouldn't really be very lucrative for us. And also, I did feel a little bit uncomfortable um asking parents to pay £3 for a cupcake when obviously when we do cake sales, it's a maximum of a pound, um, and we'd only see 10% or less of that money. So um, you do have to think about what your parents would be prepared to accept and go for, and obviously, as the as the external stall holder offering something different that you as a PTA would not be able to provide because that's the hook to get people to come and spend money there. So obviously, we couldn't do iced coffees and slushies and smoothies and things, but we can do cake sales, they won't look amaz like amazing cakes, but they're still cakes, and some of our parents do make amazing cakes, so some of them do look really good. Um, but uh yes, why not try booking an external store holder just for a day or for an event? See how it goes. Why not try it? It's also great for supporting somebody else's local business as well. The next low-cost fundraiser that I wanted to mention is an online balloon race. Now, there are a number of websites offering this service, and we have done this a couple of times with the same company, and we used EcoRacing. So I think their website is ecoracing.co.uk, something like that, if you want to have a look at them. So basically, what this company offers is an online or a virtual balloon race. Um, we haven't ever done a balloon race as a PTA before in real life, and I know that balloon races I don't think they tend to happen anymore because of the impact on the environment. So some companies have been very clever and um made an online version of a balloon race. So what you what happens is this particular company has um a selection of races that you can take part in. For example, um there's one there's a Christmas shopping balloon race which starts on the 1st of December from Harrods in London, which is a very posh shop in the centre of London. Um, the balloons are released on the 1st of December and they fly for I don't know, 20 days or something, and then the balloon that has gone the furthest is declared the winner of that race and wins a special prize. So because the online race is virtual, it does take a little bit of explaining to parents and sometimes uh the rest of your committee, which I discovered. But basically, this website is really clever and it uh uses uh computer programming and real weather data, real-time weather data, to determine where the balloons actually travel to. So um what you can do is you can go on a website, register your PTA, pick a race that you would like to take part in. So they have them all throughout the year, but some of them are connected to um uh holidays like Easter time, Valentine's Day, Christmas, um, and some are collected to special days like St. Patrick's Day, something like that. So you just pick a balloon race that's going to be in the future, which gives you time to advertise the race to parents and gives people time to purchase their balloons. So you register and then you can share the link to your PTA's race with your parents and give a little brief description about how they purchase their balloons. So when you go and buy your balloon, each balloon costs £3. You can buy as many balloons as you like. But what's really lovely about this particular website is you can choose the shape of your balloon. So there are all sorts of shapes like a circle or a square or a heart shape, and then you can choose the colour of your balloon, you can name your balloon, and then you decide two crucial elements, which is first of all, how thick you want the rubber to be on your balloon, and you also decide how much helium you want to put in your balloon. So you have to obviously think very carefully and strike a balance between putting a lot of helium in, which means your balloon will go high up in the sky, um, and possibly could burst if it goes too high, or creating a thinner balloon which might travel further because it's lighter, but again is at risk of popping because the rubber might be a bit thin. So there is a bit of technical um ability required, if you like, which I I found a really fun part of it because when I was doing it with the children, they could really it felt like you were really customising your balloon and picking the pattern and the colours and the name and everything. So that was a lot of fun. Um, and all the balloons um are released on the day of the race, and what you can see then on the website is a little map, so like a Google Google Earth map, bird's eye view of the balloons being released, and then you um get updates from your balloon, or you can log into the website every few days and see exactly where your balloon has gone, how far it's travelled, and you can also see uh actually I'm not sure if I could see this because I was the owner of the account, but I could see where the winning balloon had gone and whose balloon it was. Um, but it's very interesting because obviously the winner changes as the weather conditions change. So whoever was winning to start with then might pop and might not make it to be the winner. Incidentally, if your balloon does pop, it still travels. So just because your balloon has popped does not mean you're out of the race, which I thought was a really great little detail. Uh so you didn't have to worry, nobody was complaining because their balloon popped and they couldn't get to the end. Um the other thing to note about this particular fundraiser is that the races they have on their website are not um are not just for your PTA. So any number of charities could be in the same race as you. So the you know the race could be 20,000 balloons or something, but you will definitely get notified of the winner of your own little charities um balloons. And the way the website works is that they do actually have, I think the first three balloons um who have travelled the furthest do get a special prize. So I think the first one wins an iPad or £500 or something. They're quite good prizes, but obviously the odds of winning them are quite low if you're if you have a very small PTA and there's happens to be other quite large charities in the balloon race with you. So what we decided to do was to give a prize to the balloon from our own school that won so that we knew somebody was going to win something. Um so um it went really well. Um there are fees involved, so when you buy a balloon, each balloon costs £3. And at the end of the race, about I think they take just under £5% of the donated money as their fee or their commission. So a good chunk, 75% of the money that's put in goes directly to your PTA, and um it was paid out very quickly as well after the end of the race, which was really good to see. And it was just a lot of fun, and we could put some updates on the school Facebook page saying which balloon was in the lead on this day, and then oh no, but now it's this balloon's in the lead and has travelled this far. So it was quite a bit of fun, and people were checking when their balloons were. Um so yeah it was easy. So from a PTA point of view, obviously you have to create an account on the website, pick your race, then you advertise, advertise, advertise to parents to say you must buy your balloon by this date. And then you basically let the race win uh run, and um and then you just might want to buy a couple of prizes and award those to the winners. So it is a very easy fundraiser. Um we've actually run it twice now, uh a few years ago, so it might nearly be time for us to have another go at that one. Um but yeah, it was it was a really fun thing to do, it was something completely different. Um, and what was also good about it was because it was web-based, you can involve um, you know, the children can involve family members from anywhere in the country. I mean, I know that some people from abroad bought balloons as well. Um, and you could get grandparents buying balloons on behalf of their grandchildren, so it was a very inclusive um fundraiser, and we made a few hundred pounds from it. And I think if we did it again, I think we probably would raise a bit more just because our school's got a bit bigger now. So um so yeah, why not give that a try? I'm not really sure what category of fundraising that would come under because I'm not sure if there are other online games um that you can um sort of sign up to playing. I I don't really know how I'd categorize this, but it's an online virtual fundraiser, um, and again, not much effort for the PTA, something a bit fun to do, something a bit different. So um, as I mentioned, there are a few different companies um doing it, so do have a look around at what they offer. Um, they're all a little bit different, so just pick the one that you feel would work um best for your school. But yeah, give it a try. And the final low-cost, uh, relatively easy fundraiser that I wanted to add into this episode is a sponsored activity fundraiser. Now I've left this one till last because this does very much depend on the activity that you have selected for the children to do. Um, the activity might be something that the children do at home. If it's something the children do at home, then this makes this particular fundraiser even easier. If it's something the children have to do at school, or if it's something that the PTA have to organise for the children to do, obviously that adds in extra work. So, for the purposes of this low-cost, easy fundraiser episode, I'm going to suggest to you that you pick an activity that the children can do in their spare time, or they can do at home, or they can do over a half-term holiday or something, so that your role as a PTA is kept as simple as possible. So, what you need to do for this fundraiser is basically pick an activity that children can be sponsored to do. So, this could be something that links into the school curriculum, into the topic of the day. Sorry, a topic of the term, not topic of the day. Um, it could be something that links to the values that your school is following for that term. It could be something to do with a cause that is close to the heart of the school. There's so many things that you could pick, um, but when you do pick your activity, you need to make sure that it's something concrete that the children can actually do, that they can show other people they have done, because that is what you are sponsoring them for, or sponsoring them to do, if that makes sense. So when we have um done this in the past, we chose to challenge the children to actually we made it so much more simple for ourselves. We actually challenge the children to choose their own activity, their own challenge to do, um, as long as it they did it over 21 days or they did it 21 times. So we called the challenge challenge 21. They had to think of something to do uh involving the number 21. Um, and we had a huge variety of um things that the children pick. So some children pick to do something every day for 21 days, some children pick to do something 21 times, some children pick to learn something or 21 times. Um the children have such great imaginations, and actually, I think if they can pick their own activity that gives them a bit of ownership about what they're doing and a bit of accountability and responsibility as well to get it done. So that's what we went with. Um, and what we did was we set up a just giving page for the whole school to donate into one page rather than each child having their own page, and we chose to do it that way. One, because our school is very small, two, because um we thought it would be more um uh incentivizing to see their money grow quickly if everybody was paying into the same page, um, and to kind of just also have a school community feel about it, where everybody was contributing to the same cause. Um, and that worked extremely well. Uh, I would highly recommend it. So, in terms of the work of the PTA required for this sort of fundraiser, obviously the crucial part, the part to get absolutely right, is to pick the activity or what the children are going to be sponsored to do. Um, and if you can come up with a really good idea or a very simple idea that's very clear, then I think it will go very well. Uh if then you need to decide how you're going to collect the money. Uh I don't know if people still do sponsorship forms and people bringing cash in. Um, we ran our challenge during COVID, so we had no choice but to do a just giving page. But to be honest, it made the whole process much simpler. It's so easy to log in and donate some money, and again, this works really well for family members who live elsewhere across the country. And we were also, as a PTA, able to collect gift aid from just giving because we had set up with them. So there were lots of reasons why we decided to do this completely online. And then obviously, as with all of these um uh activities, all of these low-cost uh low effort events, it's all about the advertising. Okay, so we were advertising what the challenge was going to be, then we're advertising how um children could take part, and then when it was underway, when it had actually started, we were still advertising it, saying well done to everybody taking part. We were getting some updates from children, so we could say, Oh, so and so's done this 10 times already, and so and so is doing this to kind of motivate the children and help them. Um, we did actually get the children to fill out some pledge sheets, so we just designed a little A4 sheet so they could fill it out before the challenge started, just to say, This is what I'm going to do for my challenge. And then when the challenge finished at the end of 21 days, we made certificates for every child to say congratulations on um achieving oh da da, whatever they'd done, and these were handed out to all the children, and then we could all celebrate as a whole school the amount of money that we raised. Now, this was an absolutely fantastic fundraiser for us as a small school, we raised over £3,000 in this one fundraiser, which is an absolutely immense amount of money for us. So, just to put that in perspective for you, if we had run a summer fate or big summer event instead of doing this challenge activity, um, we would have raised about a thousand pounds. So, for the amount of effort that we had to put in for this sponsored activity, it was quite incredible how much money we raised. Um, I have to say though that this um sponsored activity did take place in the second year of COVID, so we hadn't been doing very much fundraising, and I do wonder if the parents really got on board with it because obviously we hadn't done very much, it was very difficult to do any fundraising, as you know, and so perhaps it was just a really special one that everybody got on board with. But every child took part, and it was a really wonderful way of people giving back to the school, and especially the children, they really like to be involved. So, I mean, in this case, they did all the work. So, when we you know publicised how much we raised, we made um sure that we thanked the children because it was all their hard work that had really brought in the sponsorship money. So, a sponsored activity can be extremely lucrative. Um, we tend to opt to do a sponsored activity once a year because I don't think you can really ask people to be sponsored more than once a year, and so that's why we think really carefully about what the activity is going to be. Another one that we did last year was um came from one of our teachers, which was to um give out to every child a little matchbox, a very plain matchbox, which I think you can just buy from an online craft store, and they were challenged over uh February half term to fill the matchbox with as many tiny treasures from nature as they could fit in. And there was a prize for was two prizes actually, there was a prize for the matchbox that had the most um treasures inside it when it came back to school, and the second prize was for uh because the matchboxes were completely plain white cardboard, the um we asked the children to decorate their match boxes, so there was a prize for the best decorated matchbox as well, regardless of how many um little stones and feathers and things that you could fit in your matchbox, and we turned that into a sponsored activity, and that on its own raised um oh I can't, I think it was about £600 as well. So, you know, for the cost of 80 matchboxes, which was not very much money at all, I think it was maybe 10 or 20 pounds, if that, um, we raised 600 pounds again for hardly any effort because the children had to go out and fill their match boxes. So always stick a sponsored activity into your um annual fundraising plan. Um, mix it up, have something different each year. Um, but make sure the children are involved. This is where they can really shine and really raise money for the school, and they're not afraid to ask their family members, uh, will you sponsor me to do this? Um, and it just, I don't know, it just I love the fact that we're all fundraising together, you know, everybody's joining in and making that totaling gift aid go up and up for the school. So I would highly recommend getting involved with a sponsored activity if you can think of a good one. So those are my top eight, uh, eight or nine um low effort, low-cost fundraising ideas that maybe you could give a try. Uh, I did a little calculation actually. Um, I have based this calculation on a school with a hundred pupils, or if a hundred pupils take part. So if you ran six non-uniform days in the year, that should generate six pounds per child. If you ran three cake sales, that should generate a minimum of three pounds because we all know children like to buy more than one cake. If you do one book sale and a child buys two books at 50p, you could generate a pound from that. And if you ran an online bloom race, then you could get £3 per child, but obviously probably more. Um, so as a minimum, that if you ran those things, um then you could earn £13 per child. So in a school of £100 children, that would be £1,300 of low effort, low-cost fundraising activities. If you also added in a sponsored activity and we just assumed that um each child would get £10 worth of sponsorship, then your profit would go up to something like £2,300 in one year as a low-cost, low effort fundraiser, fundraising activities, which um I know for some schools that might not seem like a lot if you have a school of 600 kids, but just think how that multiplies up with those low effort ones. Um if you're a school, if you're a small school with about £100 children, then that I I know how hard that fundraising can be as well at the sort of other extreme end. And so to raise £2,000 with um low effort fundraisers is a fantastic start to your fundraising in a year. So if you haven't um or if if you haven't sort of looked at those really small fundraisers in detail, I would really encourage you to just go through your plans for each term and just see what little fundraisers you can squeeze in because they really do add up together, and I would highly recommend that you don't um you know just shove them to one side and think they're not worth it because absolutely they are, and you never know what can come out of those little ones. So I hope you've uh enjoyed listening to the uh ideas that have worked for my PTA. I'm sure there are lots of other low-cost, low effort uh fundraising ideas out there, um, some of which might might be commonly known, and some of which might be ones that you've thought of yourselves. So I'd be really interested to hear um which fundraisers have particularly worked for you. So do drop me an email at hello at ptapodcast.com and I would love to hear more about them. So take care until the next episode. I hope your fundraising is going well, and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.