Fundraising in a small school

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 to celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. I know that a lot of PTAs have their big fundraisers in the summer, just like at Christmas time. And uh so because they're big fundraisers, they take a lot of preparation, don't they? So if you are in the middle of organising your summer fate or your summer event, maybe it's not a fate, maybe it's something else, then I do hope it's going well at this stage, and I do hope you have got a lot of support from your PTA team and other members of the school community. Why don't you let me know what you've got planned? Drop me an email, it's hello at PTApodcast.com. So I spent a bit of time last week um just updating my PTA podcast website, as I couldn't fit all my episodes on the website. And I know some people were visiting the website and they couldn't um find all my episodes on there because it was only showing the last I think most or the most recent five episodes. So I have changed that now. So if you do go to my website, all of the episodes are available on there to listen to. But you can also um subscribe to my podcast if you listen to podcasts through Apple Podcasts or Spotify Podcasts, and then uh those apps will alert you when I have a new episode that's been released. So you might like to do that and uh leave me a rating and review, which will be lovely. So today I thought I would share my experience of what it's like to be on a PTA in a small school. Oh, by the way, if you hear any drilling noises, my builders are still here um doing the roof now. We've moved on, we've got some walls, some beautiful walls, and um they're now fixing the roof. So there might be some drilling noises, but I um because I don't know when they're doing drilling and sawing and when they're not, I thought I would go ahead and record this podcast anyway. So hopefully you can still hear me okay over the drilling, and I don't know how much drilling there's going to be, but let's let's keep our fingers crossed, it's not too much. Um yes, I'm going to be talking about what it's like fundraising in a small school. I think I mention uh basically every episode that my school is on the small side, we have 85 children in three classes. Um, so we our first class is reception and nursery children, our second class is year one and year two children, and then our third class is year three, four, five, and six children, and it's been like that for a few years now. What tends to happen in my local community is that um we have some children who come for just key stage one and then they go leave to go to a different primary school um after year two, so we tend to have like a very bottom-heavy um cohort of children, and then some of the children leave um at the end of year two, so then we have a smaller key stage two class, and all the children basically fit in one class, so it kind of works quite well. Um the teachers are very experienced in teaching in that way, and they do split the uh years three and four and five and sixes for English and maths, so they do get um slightly tailored or more tailored, more focused, um, smaller groups for those subjects, and they all come together to learn for the um the other subjects that they do, like science and history and geography and RE and that sort of thing, and PE. Um, so uh yes, so my school is 85 children, and I did actually want to have a look on the internet and get some statistics on what sort of size schools are in the UK. I was hoping to find some information about how many small schools there were compared to how many larger schools, uh larger primary schools there were, but I couldn't find quite the right numbers. Um, the only thing I managed to find was the average size of a primary school from the government website. So the average size of a primary school uh is 276 pupils, if that's of interest to you. But I know there are some teeny tiny schools, even smaller than mine, which might have 40 children or less. Um, and I know at the other end there are some really big primary schools which might have over 700 children. So there's a huge widespread across uh the country. And the reason I mention the size of my school so much in my podcast is because I think the size of your school is very relevant to what you can hope to achieve as a PTA. Um, so I always feel like I have to put my events in context for you and everything I do on my PTA, uh, as the way that my PTA organises things might not work if your school is a very different size to mine. So hopefully, the things that I talk about in this podcast, the ideas are things that can be used at any school. It's just how you actually execute them would be different in obviously a school my size compared to a school with 700 children. And I do actually think about that quite a lot. How, for example, um a bigger school would run something that we take for granted at my school, which will be a really easy peasy cake sale, where we would get parents to donate the cakes, and the children will come after school. My school is small enough that there is one cue at the cake stall, and we get through everybody in about 20 minutes, and everybody goes home with a few cakes, we've cleared the table, everyone's happy. But I don't know how I would actually organise that if I had a school of 700 pupils. That kind of blows my mind um thinking about ramping that up. I mean, I think the only way I could think of to do it and to manage it might be to break it down into year groups, um, so that I don't know, the year threes have a cake sale on this day, and then the year fours have a cake sale on the other day. Uh, but then obviously that means you're organising seven different cake sales, which requires a lot of cake and requires a lot of volunteers. Um, so I'd be really, really interested if you are in a bigger school than mine, even school 300, I still don't know how you do that. Uh, so yeah, do let me know. In particular, cake sale, how do you organise your cake sale? How do you get the children through? How do you um accept the donations and have time to put them out on the tables, all that sort of thing? I'd be very interested to hear all about that. So do let me know. So I'm going to start my episode today talking about the pros of fundraising in a very small school. And the first thing that springs to mind is that they there is a great community spirit already in the school. When I go to pick up uh my children, I know basically everybody who is waiting in the playground to pick up their children. I I don't think I know everybody by name, but I know which child is associated with which parent or grandparent or whoever comes to pick them up. Um, I think most of them know who I am because I'm always asking for volunteers and I'm writing things for the newsletter and doing things in the playground, and I'm a volunteer at school quite a lot, so Pete the kids know me quite well, um, and therefore the parents do as well. So I think that our school, because it's small, everybody knows everybody, the teachers know everybody, we know the teachers, it just has a really lovely um community feel about it, which I don't know if that is the same for all schools, um, a similar size to mine, but certainly mine um is like that. And because of that fact, I think that most of the PTA activities that we organise, everybody joins in. So I never have to worry that I'm gonna organise something and people won't come along or won't do it. That's mostly because the things we organise we focus on the children. Um we haven't really done anything for parents only because just because I think there's so few families at our school that I just don't think it would work. So the activities are focused on the children taking part, and that does mean that the children are keen to come along, and so everybody comes along. Um, and um that is a really lovely thing, and yes, something that I don't really have to worry about. So that is definite pro. Something else which is really beneficial. Again, I don't know if all small schools have this, but our school has a whole school WhatsApp uh group, sorry, nearly said page, it's a group, which is really handy for sharing PTA info in directly to parents. So I think we have about maybe 50 families at the school. Obviously, not everybody is on the WhatsApp group, not everybody wants to be part of that. Some people have way too many WhatsApp groups, which I totally understand. Um, but I think a majority, let's say 70 to 80 percent of our families, or one of the parents is a member of the school WhatsApp group, and we use this group to share information about school. It's definitely not a place where people say, I don't know, share gossip or anything, or share rumours or anything, or talk about the teachers. It's it's a very interesting group, actually. It's definitely self-policing, nobody seems to step out of line, which is really fantastic. Uh, and you know, people the messages that people generally put on are oh, is it P for such and such a class today? Um, or what time do we have to pick them up from the school trip? You know, it's information like that that parents just need another parent to help them out with. Um, we but as I said, because we um have a direct line to parents through the WhatsApp group, we definitely use it to promote our PTA activities and to remind parents to come along to our events um or remind parents to share the link for sponsorship, that sort of thing, which is really really helpful. We do also email out from the school email account, our school um administrator does that on our behalf, so we draft the emails and she will email them out for us, but just to have another way of communicating with parents is so so useful, and I really do appreciate that. So, speaking of easy access to parents, obviously, because we're quite small and my team, my PTA team, and I are often at pick up and drop-off in the school playground. We have easy access to the parents there. So, um, for example, last year we ran a summer raffle and we were selling tickets at um drop-off and pick-up sometimes. So we had direct access to people buying tickets there, we can chat to people, we can sometimes ask for volunteers, that kind of thing. I don't really like doing that in the playground, I have to say, I'm a little bit shy of approaching people in that way, but not everybody's like that, and some of my team are great at doing that. Um, but basically, we are in an environment, my PTA is in an environment where we can talk to the parents potentially twice a day if we really wanted to, which is very handy for those times when people come and ask us questions or something like that. And because we are at school quite a lot, I think the other parents are able to identify who is on the PTA. So I think they know who I am and some other members of my team, which is great because then they can approach us, and I have been approached in the playground before and asked a couple of questions about an event that somebody wasn't sure about or asked if I needed donations for something. Um, so that's lovely that people can easily come and chat to us. And the other um part of the school community would be their members of staff who work there, and in our very small school, they are extremely supportive of our PTA. I I know that's not the case for everybody's um school, and um I am very grateful that my school's teaching staff um can really see the benefits of the PTA, um, can appreciate how hard we work to raise the money, and they are very thoughtful about how that money is spent. Um, but I do not um I know that not everybody has that experience, and and I do sympathise with you if you are finding that difficult with your um staff at your school. Um I'm not sure entirely whether the teachers are so supportive because we're a small community or whether we just got lucky with our teachers and they I know that a couple of them are on PTAs themselves or have been in the past for their own children, so perhaps they just have a better understanding of the value a PTA can bring. Um, I'm not entirely sure, but um, but certainly from from my point of view, they are very supportive. And because again, we are a small school, so we're on a small site as well. Um, I think our parents can more easily see where the PTA money has been spent. So, for example, we have recently contributed to the Year Six Leavers hoodies, which are given to the Year Sixes just after the Easter holidays, and so our Year Sixes, you know, drop off and pick up, you can see them coming in in their hoodies. So the reception parents, the year one parents can clearly see that they're wearing something different, and we can obviously comment some in different places saying, Oh, yes, you know, we always contribute to the year six Leavers hoodies, and that's a very visual thing for parents to see, and when their children get to year six, they will also benefit from that. Also, at my school, um, we donated money to the reception um play area, and where we wait for our children to come out is right next door to the reception play area. So, all the little lovely wooden structures in there were funded or part funded by PTA money, um, and so it's really nice that parents are kind of standing right next to it. So, if they ever said, Oh, what's the PTA ever done? Well, I can easily point out some very big things in the in the outside space, so they don't even have to go into the school to see what we have done, it's it's very visual. Uh, another thing is that we funded um last year our project was to fund an outside forest learning area on the on in the school grounds, so again, that's something that parents would be able to see. So, um, and I do believe that because our school site is smaller, obviously, we can we can see across it, so we can see those things, and because our group uh of children is smaller, they all go into school together. We don't have any separate playgrounds or separate areas that I think um some larger primary schools might have. So, parents can see everything and can see all the children and can see the benefits actually across the years. Obviously, I've just given two brilliant examples really of the fact that we support um across the years our schools, so the year six leavers hoodies and the reception play area, so um, they can see that our support is uh quite universal. And the final pro that I could think of on my list about being in a smaller school is that having a small school community, having a small number of families who come to your school makes you reach out to your local community because obviously you're otherwise asking the same 50 families every time you want to do a fundraiser, and I think it's really important if you can reach out to your local community, there are so many benefits of involving your local community in your school. I can imagine that a lot of village schools do have village events and bring people from the community in inside the school to take part in those. So I live in part of the country where there are a lot of small villages and therefore a lot of small village schools, and I have been to other uh village school fates because it's fun, and in the summer on a Saturday, it's nice to take the kids out and experience a different sort of fate. Uh, it's also nice to go to an event that I haven't actually organised myself, and um you know, just to be a like a customer at a village fate is really or a school fate is really good fun for me. I really like it. But one particular village near us, they uh the school, the village school has their fate on a Saturday. It's been like that for gosh, I don't know how long, since I've lived in this area, really long time, and people from the village go to the school's summer fate. And I think what's really nice about that is they have people going to the summer fate who obviously used to go to the village school but they've grown up, they go to a different school now, but they still go to that uh school's summer fate, and so that's drawing the community back in and bringing bringing money in from the village into the school, and I think it's extremely successful. So, if you have if your school is in a very supportive community like that, then I would definitely say that you would benefit from trying to involve the local community if you can, and you never know what's going to come of doing that, you never know who you're going to meet, you'll never know what sort of support you'll get from your local community. So, if you haven't already tried reaching out to your community, then uh give it a go. Having said all that, my school is in a village, but it's in a very tiny village, and the village it's in doesn't really have a community feel, which is so disappointing, I have to say, because I was really looking forward to involving the community in some of the events that we were organising. But after being chair for a few years, I realised that the community that surrounds my particular village school isn't that way inclined. Uh, we did have a our summer fate on a Saturday one year to see if we could attract some more people to come, but it didn't really work. There aren't many families that actually live in the village where my school is. It's it's a rather strange arrangement. We have this small village with hardly any houses, but we have a village school, and most of the people that come to my school drive in, myself included, because I don't live in the village where my school is. Uh, so a lot of the people drive in. Um, so the school is kind of like a destination for those families, and the people that actually live in the village, there aren't many families, there's not much family housing in the village. So they might I mean, I think when we had Osma Fate, they came in, some of them, a handful of them, came in for maybe a cup of tea and a piece of cake, which obviously still money to the school and everything, that was great, but we didn't really engender a sense of community from it, and to have the school fate on Saturday was actually quite hard for my PTA, so we switched back to having it after school on on a weekday, and so now because our fate is after school on a weekday, we can't really welcome the local community in because a lot of them work. Um, so unfortunately for my school, involving the local community doesn't really work. So, my school's a little bit of an exception to this pro of being in a small school, but I think I would like to think that most of the time, if you're in a small school, you have a great community around you, and it would be wonderful if you could make the most of that if you can. Obviously, it's not always the case that you can, as in my case, but if you can, then then that is a real big pro. Okay, so we have talked about all the pros that I could think of, and we're going to move on now to talk about the cons, the challenges of fundraising in a small school. But I'm going to put a little bit of a twist on this, um, I'm going to spin it a bit because I'm going to talk about what the challenges are, what we find really tricky, but I'm also going to say how we try and overcome those tricky situations and sometimes bend them to our advantage. Um, so I would be really interested to hear from you if you recognise any of these challenges that face um PTAs at a small school. Perhaps there are they are things that you have also encountered. And I'd be really interested to hear if you have overcome them in a similar way or maybe a different way. So please do let me know. Okay, the first thing I have on my list is that we do not have very much PTA storage space at my school. Um we do have a cupboard, and recently we have acquired another cupboard. These are under-the-sink kind of sized cupboards, so they are very small, and the types of things we can keep in our cupboard also, therefore, have to be very small. So we have included in our cupboard perhaps some leftover prizes. So we've got some pencils and gel pens and some lollies that were left over from an event we organised recently, and we also have some um bingo cards that honestly have been in that cupboard since I joined the PTA, so they must have been in there for ten years, and we have never used them, but I don't want to throw them away in case we then have to buy some more. Um but they take up space in the cupboard. Um we also have uh some I don't know, it's just like loads of bits and pieces from various events, some paper bags, some leftover stickers, you know, that that kind of thing. Because we don't have very much space at school, we basically, as a PTA, have no assets at all. We don't have anything like a popcorn machine, a candy floss machine, like I've seen that some other PTAs have. We don't have any big games um, you know, that we can roll out every year at a fate. We just don't have anything like that because there is no space at our school to store it, and within our PTA team, we don't have um anybody willing to store big items like that at their house or in their garage. So the way we overcome our storage problem is in fact uh that we don't have anything, we don't have any assets. The biggest thing we own as a PTA are some acrylic stands that we use as signs on our tables if we're having a fate, and uh that is it. That is the biggest thing we own. It is a shame. I think that if we had more space, for example, if we had a storage shed, then we probably would purchase some games or make something that we could then roll out each year. We might have some signs that some like big signs, you know, that stand on the ground. Um, we might be able to have I don't know if we would ever buy something like a popcorn machine or a Candy Force machine, but it would be nice to have the option of putting those things out if um we had the storage space and we just don't have it and aren't gonna get it anytime soon. So that is a real challenge for us, and we rely on the goodwill of our PTA volunteers basically. If we're having an event, so recently obviously we had the Easter egg event, we had to source about 100 eggs, and so we had to very carefully work out when to buy them, who was gonna put the ruffle tickets on. The per that person was obviously happy to hold a hundred Easter eggs in their house for a few days, and then we had to transfer them to school, and we um took them into school. I think it was only the day before, because there is literally no space in our school because it's so small, so we're hiding trying to put them on the top of cupboards and things, and of course, the children would have seen them, we could we couldn't hide them away from the children, but um yeah, it is a challenge not having any storage space, and uh we just basically have to deal with that, and as I said, we just don't really have any assets to um as in make make it a problem, really. So that is one of the challenges of being at a small school, there is not much storage space, and something else which is difficult at a small school is the size of our school community. So, obviously, I have listed some reasons why a small school community can be very beneficial, but it is a small community, and we are obviously asking those that same group of people uh regularly for money or donations, and so to overcome that and to try and make sure that people don't get tired of us asking all the time, we have a couple of uh strategies there. So, the first thing is that we limit the amount of fundraisers that we do. So, when we are doing some planning, we normally look at our terms and we have one small fundraiser per term and one bigger fundraiser. I was gonna say per term, but sometimes it's every other term. It kind of depends on how big that fundraiser is. So, for example, a small fundraiser I would say is something like a non-uniform day or a cake sale or a secondhand uniform sale, that sort of thing, where people are basically spending a pound or two pounds. And then a bigger fundraiser would be anything else. So, uh, for example, a sponsored event or one of our a Christmas fair or summer fate, um, um oh, I can't think of one right now, but those bigger ones where we would want people or we would want to encourage people to spend maybe £10 or more. So we try and limit what we are asking for so that when we do ask, people are more likely to say yes and join in. And the other way we manage our small community is we also try not to repeat um events too often. So um, by that I mean the type of events we're offering. So obviously, if it's a non-uniform day, we can repeat that because we we do change it each term, so it has this different slant. So, our non-uniform day, this term is going to be our Break the Rules Day, which is um right at the end of term, and last term our non-uniform day was Crazy Hair Day, so we try and give each one a slightly different theme so it feels a little bit different for the children, and it's not just the same. And then with our bigger events, again, we try not to repeat exactly the same event too often. So, for example, we have run a um balloon race, an online balloon race, which I talked about in my low-cost uh fundraising episode. If you want to have a listen to how that works, we have done that twice, but we won't be doing it again for a little while, um, just because people have done it a couple of times and you know they might be bored of it, they might not want to take part again. So I try to make sure that we're offering something different. Obviously, at the fairs and the fates that we do, the stores are always different there, so I'm not concerned about oh, it's another Christmas fate. I'm not concerned about that, but it's those other types of events that we might do maybe once um every couple of years or every three years or something like that. So, yeah, to overcome asking repeatedly for donations from our small community, we try and keep things fresh and we try not to over-ask, and that seems to be working quite successfully so far. One of the major problems with fundraising at a small school is that when you want to make a purchase for your school, things cost the same amount of money as if you were buying it for a larger school, but we've only got a small community of parents from which to raise the money to purchase the item. So I'm not talking about I don't know, the amount of footballs we might need. I'm not talking about that because obviously that is scaled down depending on how many children we have. I'm talking about quite large assets. For example, if we wanted to fund an outdoor classroom, or if we want to so um recently we did fund a school library at our school, and we had to raise an awful lot of money to install the library in an empty classroom, and uh the cost of that library is the same, no matter which school, which which size school your children go to. The cost of the books, the cost of the furniture of the library is the same at every school if you're converting a classroom into a library. And so for our school community, um we had to fundraise for two years to make those purchases, um, and obviously we can only squeeze so much money out of our families and other little pots of money we had like sort of access to, it was really difficult, and I will actually be recording an episode all about how we managed to achieve that because it was a major achievement, and I feel on a personal note, it was my legacy that I have left at the school because I worked really, really hard on that. Uh, so because things are you know cost the same price no matter what size school you're at, basically, this is not something we can overcome. This is something we have to accept, and accept that things may take longer to arrive at our school because it takes us longer to gather up the money. There are probably a few ways you could overcome it. Um, one of those ways, obviously, is if you can apply for grants and apply for other funding, which we have tried in the past. Um, so that does make it a little bit easier, but obviously, applying for grants takes quite a long time. You might have to wait quite a long time for the to hear whether your grant is successful or not. So um it's not an easy solution. There isn't an easy solution to this one, and sometimes it's just about being determined and being focused and bringing your community along with you if you have a really specific goal in mind that you can all fundraise for together. And actually, because it took us a couple of years to um achieve the fundraising for our library, once the library was up and running and open, I feel that because we worked so hard to get it, it's very, very valued at our school, um, which is lovely, and and I think everybody, I would I would hope that everybody feels like they contributed to a piece of that library because everybody took part in the fundraising activities that we organized. I certainly feel like part of my part of my heart is in that library because I worked so hard and I was so determined that we were going to have that library. We did apply for a grant for the library which was rejected, and so then we had no choice. We had no choice but to fundraise for it ourselves, and we achieved it, but it was a lot of hard work. Another major problem with uh fundraising at a small school is that we have a small number of volunteers who are available, and obviously a small number of teachers who also might want to take part. So, this is actually something that I struggle with all the time because I have incredibly ambitious plans for my PTA and the types of events that we can organise, and how I want the event to be, and how I want the children to feel when they come to it, and the experience that they have. I I'm just so ambitious. I think I'm sometimes a bit too ambitious when it comes to those things. Um, but I have learnt, and I I feel like I've only learnt this in the last year. I don't know why it's taken me so long, quite frankly, but I feel like I've only learned this recently that perhaps it's best to tailor events to the number of volunteers that you have, uh, rather than the volunteers you hope to acquire. Um and so that means if you don't have a big volunteer base, obviously there are things that you cannot do, like you cannot have a massive fate with 26 doors because you just literally don't have enough people to stand behind them. And um if you wanted to do something like a 10k run or something, you need marshals to stand along the route, and you just might not have enough people. So there are some events that we just wouldn't be able to do, and sometimes you just have to accept that and you have to just scale it down if you can, and also realise that it will be much more achievable if you can focus on the amount of people that you know are going to be available to help. So I have had to learn that the hard way really. Um it take it's taken me such a long time because I I just get so excited about organising big events that I can't bear to think I can't do it. So I rope in people from all different places, um, and uh I think last year I just I'd I just did too much and uh I I've now realized that it's just not possible. You can't just you can't just open a door and a whole flood of volunteers will come in, it's just not like that, and um uh yeah, so that is something that we have to consider carefully, and um we try and overcome it as best we can, but obviously there is a limit to how many bodies you can actually actually coerce into helping. So having said that though, I do understand as well from listening to other people at bigger schools that even though there is a big group, bigger group of parents and teachers at a bigger school, that does not necessarily mean that they all volunteer to help. I totally understand that, I really do, and and my heart breaks for you actually because it must be really hard to see a sea of people in the playground picking up their children and just wishing that they would just help a little bit more. I do feel you. Um I I think it's a you know a universal um sigh of sadness really from PTAs when they need more volunteers and we don't know how to get them. So I I know that's that is a problem at many schools. Um at least at a bigger school, there might be more potential for volunteers. Um, in a small school, there is a you know very limited number. And something else which is limited at a small school are the school buildings and the school grounds in which to hold events. So we are actually quite lucky at my school. We have a very large outside space, we have a large playground, we have a large grassy pitch, a grassy field, and we also have a little wild area with trees and a pond. So outside space at my school is actually really fantastic for the size of school we have, but it's our inside space that's very tricky. And as you know from a previous episode about my colour run, rainbow run event, um we have had some bad weather experiences with some of our events, and that has made me evaluate the inside space even more to see if we could hold our events inside instead, and trying to work out how we can best use that space. So I have even been considering how people would flow around the inside space if we moved a fate inside and where the bottlenecks might be, um, etc. etc. So um again we're a small school, we do not have many classrooms, we have a small school hall, and we don't have any spare rooms. Um, so setting up events inside is really tricky, especially after school, because obviously the teachers are still teaching in their classrooms, so we can't have access to classrooms to set up for events to happen straight after school. It's it's really difficult. We do a little bit better with reception classroom only because they have to start getting ready to leave the school earlier, like you know, finding the hats and coats and book bags and things, so we can um set up something in their classroom a bit earlier because they've all lined up elsew elsewhere. But in the other classrooms, they are, you know, teaching right until the last minute, so it is um very difficult. And because we've had those bad weather experiences, and I have had to move some things inside the school, I feel a lot more clued up now on how the space does work at the school and where we can have access to and what we can fit into those spaces. It's all very well having a school hall available for a face, but you cannot ram it full of stalls because you need space for people to move around the stalls, um, don't want any hazards of you know, people knocking children over or anything. So, because of my bad weather experiences, I have then had to have things inside, which has led me to have a go basically at fitting events in the school, which has been really handy. And I have in the past used a wide corridor for um and had stalls down there because it was just wider, there's enough space for people to stop at the stalls, but also people to get past on the outside. So um I guess it's about trying to use your space creatively or as creatively as you can, and um also praying for good weather, basically, so that anything you organise outside you might actually get chance to uh to run it, unlike me. And now I'm going to talk about donations, and I think we all know donations can be a bit tricky, whatever size school you're in. We get a very mixed bag of donations. So when I'm talking about donations, I'm saying, um, for example, if we were running a fate and we asked people to donate bottles to a bottle tombola or something, we get a very uh eclectic mix, shall we say, of bottles. Um, but obviously the main problem is that we might not get enough. Again, small community. I would hope that each family would donate one item, it's not always the case. Sometimes we're lucky and families might donate more than one thing, which is wonderful. Um, but it can be really tricky. So I'm sure this is a problem in schools of all sizes, uh, but um it can be really hard if we don't get enough donations to actually make a stall. So, for example, we held a cake sale, I think it was a couple of times ago, and we always asked for cake donations. We hold cake sales all the time at my school. I mean, the parents must be so well versed in cake sales by now, and we always have plenty of donations, and for some reason, for this cake sale, there just weren't enough donations, there just weren't enough cakes, and um my school administrator dropped me an email and said, Von the cakes have been left in the in this room, um, but I don't but there's not very many, so I got her to send me a photo or estimate how many there were, and there were about I don't know, 40 cakes, and we have obviously 80 children, and I was like, Oh no, what am I gonna do? What should I do? I've never been in this situation before. My whole seven years as being chair, I've never been in a situation where we don't have enough cakes, very rare, and I wasn't sure what to do, and I wasn't sure whether to go down the path of doing the cake sale without enough cakes for everybody, and obviously saying to people, you know, we can only sell what we've been donated, and this is what we've been donated, and actually how to handle that, because I would have wanted to tell people in advance that maybe there weren't enough cakes, and I just couldn't bear the thought of a large queue forming, which it normally does for the cake sale, and then the children at the back who just happened to be at the back of the queue, or then this just the second half of the queue, um, not being able to get a cake. I mean, I I just did not want that to happen. I just didn't want it to happen, so I decided uh that I would sort out another 40 cakes. So I baked um 40 cakes. I have a recipe that's really quite quick and easy, so I did, and I did have time that afternoon to fit that in, so I did it. Um, and it meant that every child had a cake who wanted one, and that was really good. I was very pleased that I did that, but it was a really unexpected um situation. Uh and obviously, small community, you know, not everybody can afford to bring a donation in. I totally understand. Um, but obviously it it it's kind of amplified um because we don't have uh many families. So I don't know if there's a solution to that. Obviously, relying on donations for things um under other circumstances. If we were running, for example, a um so for example, the secondhand uniform sales that we do, we do remind people to donate throughout the year. We've put out quite a lot of reminders about that. Um, but for a cake sale, we just have to see what turns up on the day, it's a bit difficult. We obviously do remind people, but you are then stuck with what turns up on the day. So that was a tricky situation. I think I did the right thing and I would do that again if it happened again. Hope it won't though. I hope it won't. Something else that's quite tricky when you have a smaller group is that it's hard to keep your costs down if you are buying things for events, and because we have a small number of children, it's actually quite hard for us to buy in bulk as well. Um, so I obviously, as with many things, if you buy bigger bags or containers to split up it normally. Normally means a lower cost per portion, and um sometimes we just can't take advantage of that, so we have to decide basically whether to offer those things to the children at our events or not. So, for example, um the most recent example I have is when I ran the story sweet shop, which I think I talked about in episode seven of this podcast. Um I had to buy lots of sweets and we packaged them up um separately into paper bags. Uh, but because we didn't need an awful lot of sweets, I couldn't take advantage of the you know lower portion cost that I would have had buying much bigger packets of sweets. Um, so we didn't make an awful lot of profit on the story sweet shop. We still did make a little bit, but it would have been obviously better having bought in more in bulk. Um and actually I don't have many examples many examples of um where we couldn't buy in bulk because basically we have just mostly moved away from buying things or offering things like that. Um and also we can't offset the costs of more expensive items easily as we don't make as much money on the other stalls. So, for example, if I had a stall at a fate that was quite an expensive stall and we weren't gonna make a lot of money on it, or maybe we was just gonna break even, I can't easily offset the cost of that particular stall against another stall at my fate because our stalls maybe raise £20 or £30. So it's each stall as an individual is not a massive fundraiser, so it's hard to offset those more expensive items, even if they're really popular with the children. So we're always looking. Um, when we run a fate in particular, I'm always looking at the the stalls to make sure that each stall does make a little profit if it can, and that's just how we have organized it, and that's how we how we cope with the fact that we can't really buy very expensive items for our events. And the final thing I wanted to mention is the hiring of entertainers or um booking other events for the children, like a drumming workshop or something like that. Um, so for entertainers, obviously they can be really expensive, and we have not found a way to overcome this. We basically just don't do it. Our poor children never get an entertainer at my school. Uh, I know that if we had an entertainer, it would usually be a good idea to split uh the school into usually key stage one and then another group in key stage two, so that means hiring would be to hire someone to do two shows instead of one show, which obviously doubles the price of the entertainer. And we um used to do school discos and hire DJs, and we had to stop a few years ago because we just weren't making any money on the disco and it was quite a lot of work to organise, and we felt it was better to put our time into a different sort of event. We've never hired inflatables for my school um for a few reasons, not just financial reasons, but obviously, if we did hire um inflatables, I'm not sure we would actually be able to recover cost and we wouldn't want to charge a really huge amount um for the children to take part because I don't really think that's very fair. Um, so in terms of hiring in expensive things, basically we just don't do it. We just try and keep our costs for our event a l as low as possible so that we can pass on a low cost to the parents and the children for taking part because I think it's more important that most of the children can take part um then they get to have a really fun day on inflatables. Is that really bad? I've never really wanted to have inflatables. I just think I just can see so many potential accidents and headbangings and people bouncing into each other and things. Um I also I'm not sure actually if my school would would want to do that, so uh thankfully it has never come up. But uh we have often thought of hiring like an outdoor cinema screen, but again, it's just so expensive the amount of people that we would be able to round up. So unfortunately, those sort of extra exciting things are just not really available to us. Um, and that's just you know, we just accept that. That's fine. There's plenty of other things that we could organise and do, so it's not too much of a hassle, it's just sometimes those extra things can be um a real nice change, can't they, from the sort of day-to-day general PTA um events that we um organise, but unfortunately, yeah, the kids will have to find their fun for those things elsewhere. And that's all I really wanted to say about the pros and cons of fundraising in a small school. Did you recognise any of the challenges there that I mentioned? Have you got any other ways to overcome them? I would be really interested to hear if you're also in a small school and what your experience has been. So do let me know on hello at PTAPodcast.com. So I'm hoping that in the future I'll be able to run an episode with somebody to talk about the uh pros and cons of fundraising in a large school because I'm sure there are just as many challenges out there for all of you who are fundraising in a school with 700 pupils. As I said in my intro, I just can't imagine how you how you manage that and the you know the amount of volunteers you must have to try and get to hold any sort of event. So I take my hat off to you because I think that is a really hard thing to do. And yes, do let me know if you're in a big school, how do you do your cake sales? How do you make sure you can have enough people on your PTA to even organise anything? Because I know at a larger school it's just as difficult to get volunteers, so I'd be really interested to hear all about that. Uh yeah, so I guess that's it for episode 17. Thank you so much for listening. Um, do uh subscribe to my podcast if you want to be alerted when the next episode comes out, and I just wish you lots of luck with whatever you're working on in your PTA world at the moment. Um, so yeah, goodbye from me, and speak to you next time.