100% profit stalls

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Hi, welcome to the PTA Podcast. My name is Yvonne, and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. 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 budget, 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. Very, very busy term from a lot of PTAs with big events on the horizon. So I do hope that if you are involved in planning a big summer event, it's all going well so far. And I imagine you've got your BDIs on the weather forecast because the weather in the UK has been very extreme in the last two weeks. We've had baking hot sun, and now we're in the middle of um torrential downpours, which just seem to be happening every five minutes. So if you are planning a summer event, uh I do feel for you, and I know what it's like to keep watching that weather forecast, which changes every hour or so. So you have my sympathy and empathy with that. The first thing I want to do is just to remind you all that if you have read the first book in my PTA podcast virtual book club, which was called The Hive, that the book review form is now ready to be filled in. I have emailed it out to everybody on my mailing list, and I have added the link to my Facebook page. So if you're not on my mailing list, you may wish to join so that I because I will be sending it out again. Um, but you can also just get the link from my Facebook page if you want to. If you don't want to fill out the form, you can just email me with your thoughts. I would really appreciate it. If you do just drop me an email, it'd be great if you could give the book a star rating out of 10 so that I can put an overall star rating against the book on my website when I've um gathered everybody's thoughts. So you have until the 15th of June to send me your thoughts and views and opinions on the book, and I would love as many people as possible to do that so that when I talk about the book in a future episode, I can feed in some of your comments. Uh, don't worry if you don't want me to use your name, just you don't have to put your name on anything. If you send me an email, then just tell me you want it to be anonymous, absolutely fine. Um, but I look forward to hearing what you all thought about it, what you thought about the fundraising ideas that that fictional PTA ran, what the different characters were like, whether they were similar to any people in your PTA, or maybe you could relate to particular characters, I'd be so interested to hear. So do let me know what you thought of the book. If you want to quickly read it before the 15th of June, there is still time to do that as well. So uh so don't forget to tell me what you thought. So today on this episode, I'm going to talk about some stores that you could consider including at a fate or a fair at any time of year. This isn't just specific to summer events, but I thought now is quite a good time to talk about it. Um, and these stores that I'm going to talk about are all going to be a hundred percent profit for you. So that means that there are no expenses to set the stall up, and that a hundred percent of the money you take at the stall would go to your PTA as profit. I have mentioned a couple of them before in various episodes, but I thought it might be helpful to group them all together here in one go so that if you're looking for something like this, you can just listen to this one episode. I am going to include some games in this list, and these may not have 100% profit returned to your PTA because you may wish to buy prizes for the children that take part in the games. But because you have a lot of control over what you spend or give as prizes, I thought it was still relevant to include them in this episode, as they definitely fit the category of having zero setup costs. So let's dive into the list. So I have three main categories of 100% profit stalls that we can talk about. So, first of all, we are going to look at stalls where you can ask for the contents of the stall to be donated by parents and the school community. And I'm sure you know many of these already, and maybe you even have some other ideas to add to this list. So if you do, do let me know, and I can share it with other PTA volunteers on a future episode. The important thing to remember with this type of stall, which I'm going to label as the donation stall, is that you have to give your school community a few weeks' notice that you are collecting something. And the other important thing is to figure out how you're going to collect donations and where you are going to store them until the day of your event. At my PTA at my school, um, a member of the PTA would volunteer to collect any donations at morning drop-off or afternoon pickup and take a bag or a box to the playground to accept the donations. We normally got a large cardboard box and uh sort of blinged it up on the outside to make it really stand out in the playground so that if anyone had forgotten to bring something, maybe it might jog their memory. I basically had the box as also an ad advert for the donations, and so that's what we did with that. Um we also had a very good relationship with our school, so it was also okay for parents to leave things with the school office, and then as a PTA, we could collect them later on if anyone, if anyone donated them later, or or maybe a member of the PTA couldn't be there at pickup or something like that. So they were fine with us just um they were fine with people leaving things just for a day and then we would collect it. Unfortunately, though, as I've mentioned in many episodes, we never had any storage space at school because my school is very small. So we would normally have a PTA person very kindly keep the donations at their house, or in my case, sometimes in the boot of my car, because that's the only space I had to put anything, um, until the day of the event. By the way, that works really well with the secondhand books because nothing happened nothing bad happens to them if you leave them in the car. Um, so that's how it worked at my school to actually accept and collect the donations. You might have to just think that through what would work well at your school for your particular environment. There are quite a lot of different things you can ask to be donated, and for some of the things, there's a variety of different ways in which you can use them once you've got them, which is which gives you loads of uh different options, which I always think is really good. So here are some ideas of things you can ask parents to donate and what you can do with them once you've got them. So the first thing is something I actually just talked about on a recent episode, which is books, secondhand books. I think secondhand books are always a winner at any event. So I talked about this in episode 42, which is all about how you can basically convert secondhand books into money. I did a very detailed episode about that, so I'm not going to go into all the details right now. So go if you're interested in collecting secondhand books or you already have some from uh left over from something else, then do have a listen to that. I've got some ideas for you, how you can set out your store, what you can charge, and some different, more creative ideas on making your secondhand bookstall a little bit more exciting than just lobbing some books on a table. Um, so yes, you might want to listen to episode 42, but secondhand books, you always get lots of donations, and I um think people just really enjoy a rummage through a secondhand bookstall, and it also it's a very wholesome stall to have, it's encouraging reading, so you can't really go wrong with that. The second thing you can ask for donations for are toys. Everyone will have toys at home that they don't need anymore, that their children have grown out of, and they just don't play with anymore. As with donations of books, you may find that you get inundated with toys, and both books and toy donations need quite a lot of storage space and table space when you're laying out the stall, so that's something to just be aware of. You may wish to consider whether you will accept Innerverticoma's baby toys or not, or whether you will only ask for toys suitable for age three upwards, which might help to avoid the very young toys. Um, obviously, at a primary school, you are likely to have families who still have smaller siblings who might be in the baby age or might be under three, but people in my experience people generally have a lot of baby toys to get rid of, and you might find that you've been donated a lot of baby toys which aren't really suitable for primary school age children and not a lot of slightly older toys, so you might have to just see how that goes. You may also want to decide if you want to accept any soft toys, as I would recommend washing those before the sale, which is obviously an extra job for someone to do. Um, so you you just need to decide if that's what you want to do or not. You do have the option with these donation stalls to ask for specific things, so you can ask for specific toys. So, for example, you could just run a secondhand jigsaw stall or a secondhand game stall or just a teddy stall. So, whatever you decide, do make sure you allow some time before the sale for sorting through your donations to make sure the toys are safe and suitable and not broken, um chance to wash the teddies or anything soft, that kind of thing. And on the day you may wish to allow a bit of extra time to set up the stall and arrange the layout as you might want to group by age or by type of toy on the table. I do talk about this in my episode about secondhand books and the fact that if you haven't pre-sorted your books or your donations, then you'll have you're gonna have to sort them on the day as you're actually trying to lay the stall out, which is um normally takes more, well, in my experience anyway, normally takes more time than you think it will. So just a little word of caution there, you might wish to pre-sort it so that on the day it's much quicker for you to put it all out. Um also with toy donations, if you're just going blanket toy donations, there are likely to be many different items on the stall, all different ages, all different types of toy. So carefully pick some very simple pricing options here. And remember that you want to price everything, to sell everything, you want to convert all of your donations into money, but also the more you sell, the less you have to deal with at the end of the event. And believe me, you'll be very grateful for that at the end. Whenever we have run a pre-loved toy stool toy stall at my school, it has always been popular, just as secondhand booksellers, and all the money you take is 100% profit, so it's a really good stall to do. So, with the pricing, um, in the past, I think we have kept it very simple. We have either split the toys onto three different tables, and one table was one pound, one table was two pounds, and one table was three pounds. Uh, and if that's the case, you do need to volunteer at each table, or you could just um price put individual prices maybe on the larger items and keep the smaller items all at a pound or two pounds or something. Um, whatever you decide, just make it really simple so that the people running the stall on the day can't get confused, and the people buying can't really get confused. Okay, my third option for you to accept donations for is the secondhand uniform or slash um school equipment stall. So I have also found this to be a very popular stall, and we started doing ours maybe four years ago, and we had never done it before, and I saw that a lot of PTAs for selling secondhand uniform on some of the Facebook forums that I follow, so I thought we'd give it a go. And it was a slow burn to start with, but once people got used to this secondhand uniform uh stall appearing at various events throughout the year, they then look started to look for it actively being there, and um I just think it's a really great sustainable way of recycling uniform between all the years because you know some children grow out of their jumpers really quickly, so it's um it's always a really popular store. I have found that it's best to be specific about what you want people to donate, so I would perhaps um share a list of parents of what you are looking for. So, for example, obviously every person, every school's school uniform is different, but things to consider are do you want to accept jumpers or polo shirts or shirts that don't have a logo on them for your school that parents may have bought elsewhere, or will you only accept jumpers and tops with the school logo on? Are you okay accepting loads of pairs of grey trousers? Because believe me, you will get loads of pairs of grey trousers or black trousers or whatever the trousers are. You'll also get loads of pinafore dresses, that kind of thing. So it's just whether you're okay having lots of those items. And what about shoes? Would you want to consider selling secondhand shoes? Um, we did accept shoes for one of our secondhand sales and they were popular. We didn't get many pairs, but the pairs we did get were pretty new, hadn't been worn hardly at all, and yeah, got snapped up by our parent community. And there may be other things which parents would appreciate purchasing, such as wellies or waterproofs. If your school does a lot of outdoor learning, they may be able to donate book bags or rucksacks if they are in good condition. If your school has specific sporting requirements, there might be football boots or other sports equipment or sports uniform if you have specific sports uniform. Every school has different activities, so have a think about your school, what could be reused and what would be of value to parents at a secondhand uniform sale. Again, you need to allow enough time before the sale to ideally wash all the clothing which has been donated and ideally again remove any names from the children's clothing or equipment. Um, it's good to get specific volunteers to work on the um secondhand uniform because you also need to, of course, sort it by age and size as well when you are laying it out on the table. Um, you need a clear and consistent pricing strategy for this store as well. And I think for us, we did oh, so we kept our prices really low for this because I felt I don't know, I just felt that was the right thing to do. So we did any non-logoed item for one pound, so that would include the grey trousers or the shorts or whatever, and then any item with a logo on was two pounds. We just kept it really simple like that. Um, and uh yeah, everyone was really happy with the pricing and things were selling, so that's that's really good. Uh, a second hand uniform sale is also something you can do at various points throughout the year, so just make sure the pricing is consistent for all of your sales, don't change it, and finally, you also need to consider whether you want to keep any unsold items for another sale. Now, I talked in my episode about secondhand books that we tried keeping books for another sale, but they still didn't sell, and I realised they didn't sell because actually they weren't very good books. But with with a secondhand uniform sale, you're always going to get people needing various sizes. So I would say it is worth keeping the uniform. You may wish to exercise a little bit of quality control and look at your donations and think, well, is somebody actually going to buy this if it's if it's looking a bit tatty? You know, you can um cull items that you just think won't sell because that will take up storage space wherever you're going to store it. So I and I think that's absolutely fine. Um I do think it's worth establishing a regular second-hand uniform sale, which um goes throughout the year as children grow at various rates. You know, just having it once a year probably isn't enough, but that's how you could start if you wanted. So um, if you do have a regular sale, obviously you'll have to figure out where the uniform is going to be kept in the meantime between sales, and hopefully, you may be able to find some space at your school for that because it can take up again quite a lot of space with all the different sizes and the different uniform types for boys and girls, and then you know, potentially you've got other equipment, sports equipment, um, other things like wellies, which take up a lot of space, so yeah, definitely something to consider. And my next uh uh idea is a cake stall. Yay! I'm not sure if this is the same at your school, but when we have a cake sale, we ask for donations of cakes. We don't go out and buy any cakes for sale, so that's why I've included cakes as donations here. I talk about cake sales in detail in episode 32, and I will be doing a follow-up cake sales uh episode part two soon. I just haven't quite finished recording that one yet. So, all the details about how to set up the stall, how to organise it are all in that episode 32 at the moment. At my school, if we have asked for cake donations, we ask that every donation is accompanied by a list of ingredients and that they are dropped off on the morning of the event. And my episode then goes into further details about how to deal with donations, equipment you might want to have, and how to lay out your stall. My part two episode is going to cover some new ideas for cake sale and also some easy cake sale recipes to try. So do look out for that soon. But a cake sale, if you are having a cake store, do ask for donations and hopefully you'll get enough to cover your event. So, my fifth idea for a donation stall is a sweet store. So you can ask your parents for donations of sweets. Sweets or chocolates can be quite expensive, especially chocolate seems to have just ballooned in price recently. So getting them donated can work really well. And there are a few ideas that you can use sweets for. Firstly, if you get loads of sweets, you could just have a sweet sale, just put them on the table, price them up, and just sell them like that. Or you might be able to use them as prizes on game stalls, therefore saving you money on buying those prizes, and then you turn your game stall into a hundred percent profit stall by magic. So that's an alternative for you. A few years ago, we asked for donations of sweets to make a tombola stall. We sent a plain paper cup home with every child, along with a note asking parents to fill the cup with sweets and return it, and then um we made a cup tombola with them all, and it was extremely popular as tombolas or. Jam jars are quite good as they are transparent and they have ready-made lids. The paper cups were a little tricky, but uh and I can't actually remember how we stopped everything falling out of those paper cups, but we must have done it somehow. Um, and uh it was really popular, so the kids really enjoyed it. A good strategy for acquiring sweets is to ask for donations just after a holiday or a celebration, such as Halloween or Christmas, when people might want to get rid of excess sweets if they've had enough of them, and then you can keep these until you need them. So I tried this after Halloween one year. I asked for uh a sweet amnesty, you can donate drop off sweets you don't want. Here or sweets you don't want your children to eat here. And we got absolutely low. We got so many sweets that I managed to make a sweet tombola by part portioning the sweets up into little paper bags and then just putting a ruffle ticket on them to make a tombola for our Christmas fair. And I had some stripey paper bags in uh one set was green striped and one set was red striped, so they looked really festive, and uh yeah, it was really successful, and that was 100% profit because we hadn't bought any of those sweets, so that was really good. So, yes, the next idea, if you hadn't guessed already, is a Tombola. I have found that Tombola is possibly the most popular stall when we have had events. It doesn't seem to matter what the prices are, as it always clears within about 20 minutes of an event starting. And I always have to put extra volunteers on this stall, as even at my small school, it can be a bit of a scrum with people trying to get tickets. So don't underestimate the popularity of a tomboler. As a PTA, we've tried a few different tombolas over the years, so we have run them as um like anything goes tombolas, where we've just accepted a wide variety of items donated by parents, so we never quite know what we're going to get, which makes it quite fun actually. Um, for those tombolas, we do offer suggestions so people know the type of thing we're looking for. So, for example, we put out a little list and we asked for unused toilet trees. We have now had to specify that the toilet trees are unused because one year we did get uh a bottle of shower gel which had been opened and was not completely full. Needless to say, we did not include that and autombolas. So now we have to say that they have to be unused. Um, other suggestions are chocolates or sweets, bottles like bottles of things to drink or sauces or chutneys, um, accessories, toys, um decorations, games, books, etc. So if you are prepared to accept anything, it sometimes is good just to give some suggestions, uh, and obviously you don't want to accept people just throwing rubbish away via your tombola, so do um sort through what you get. Or sometimes we have chosen to run a specialized tombola, for example, just bottles or just teddies or just games. You can really pick anything you think people could donate and just ask them to donate those specific items. Again, storage of donations can be a challenge for a tombola, especially as you don't really know what you're going to get or how big those items are going to be or how fragile or breakable those items are going to be as well. And we often set the deadline for bringing in tombola items for about two weeks before the event for two reasons. So, one is to evaluate what's been donated so far, um, just in case we haven't got enough for a tombola, or um just in case we need to sort through things. And finally, because labelling all the items with a raffle ticket and then folding all of those tickets to put into the bowl can take quite a long time. So it's good to have a couple of volunteers almost just in control of the tomboler from the start, which is accepting the donations, sorting them, labelling them up, and then bringing them on the day just so that somebody uh really understands what's happening with the tomboler. Um, sometimes we were able to split our donations for a tomboler and run two or three separate tombolas, which was really exciting for everyone. So uh one of the fairs I did, we did get enough donations that we could run an adult tombola and a children's tombola because we had lots of toys donated. Um so I think we did the children's tombola was um you it was a a prize every time, so you just had to get one ticket and you definitely won a prize, whereas the adult one was you paid for three tickets and they weren't all winners, so we did sort of distinguish those two. And sometimes we had some amazing items donated that we then siphoned away from the Tomboler and instead included in our raffle. So if we got some really nice bottles of alcohol, or if we got some lovely um decorations, or you know, some really good quality toys or a set of books or something like that, we would actually look at it and think, well, actually, that would make a brilliant raffle prize. So we're going to use that in the raffle. Um, so um, yes, tombolas are very popular and um can be extremely flexible depending on what you're asking for. Um, and so actually talking about using tombola prizes in a raffle links nicely to my next topic. This is actually my final suggestion on the donation stalls, which is a raffle. Now I know that lots of PTAs already run standalone raffles at different points in the year, and for a big raffle, you may spend months gathering prizes from local businesses and organizations, but they are all donations. So a raffle is another way of using donations. Now, if you wanted to run a smaller raffle on the day of your event, then this is an easy money raiser to slot in as well. You just need a few prizes and you're good to go basically. You could ask some local cafes or businesses that give smaller prizes, even supermarkets, and you can use good quality donations from other stores, which I've already talked about to make up prizes too. And of course, you can directly appeal to parents for donations. So if you've listened to episode 41, where I talk about the two PTA quizzes that I attended, one of the quiz nights had a little raffle halfway through, and they had a small table with I think it was no more than 10 prizes. There might have even just been five prizes on there. Um, most of them were little boxes of chocolates, like a little box of Lindell chocolates. I think there was a set of notebooks, but they weren't, you know, like astoundingly amazing prizes, they were just fun prizes that most people would like to win. Um, and we all bought raffle tickets and all took part. So um it can be, you know, if you just wanted a raffle at a summer fair, it can be a really simple small raffle, which can sometimes be just as effective if you're just selling tickets on the day at the event. You don't have to worry about getting tickets printed or anything and trying to advertise and advertise and advertise it. You can just sell it on the day. Most people will just buy some raffle tickets because they want to take part and they want to donate some money. Um, and you know, it's still thrilling, I think, to just win a small box of chocolates. You might not treat yourself to one in the supermarket, but um, but it's nice to win a box of chocolates, I think. Um so for actually for one of our very small fairs, which was outside during the COVID years, we ran a small raffle, but we didn't use raffle tickets to give out to people because we were you know concerned about contamination. So we actually ran it as a hundred square, um, which is where we had a giant piece of paper and we drew a hundred squares on it, and each square was numbered one to a hundred, and people paid a pound, and they could pick a square, and they just wrote their name and phone number in that square, so they could pick as many squares as they wanted, which was kind of like their ticket. Um, and it was so easy, and then at the end of the fair, we just got a random number generator. Somebody loaded an app on their phone, which is a random number generator up to 100, and that's how we drew the winners. So it was super easy, um, hardly any effort really, and um you know, if all the all if you run a hundred square and you sell all your squares, that's £100. Brilliant. And of course, whatever you can think of to ask for a donation goes. So, for example, I saw a post just recently on a PTA Facebook forum with somebody suggesting asking for bikes and scooters to be donated as children do grow out of those, and they were going to ask people to put bids on them at the store rather than put a price on them. So, and then the person with the highest bid was the winner, and I thought that was a really good new idea because I think the children would love having a look at those, um, you know, the parents will probably appreciate getting rid of a scooter that's been outgrown and seeing seeing if they can get another one. I mean, you could also come up with other seasonal ideas such as donations of Christmas jumpers or Halloween costumes in advance of those holiday dates, and you could just run, you know, a one-off sale of donated costumes or jumpers like that. And there's probably many, many different options, and um, I would always encourage you to give something a go if you think of an idea and just see if it works, see if people actually donate for that and see if people come to buy it because I think unless you try something, you just you just don't know if it's going to work. So, we've covered how you can run stalls from items which are all donated. Now we're going to look at some options involving equipment you already have at school. Anything you can do using equipment you already have will give you a store with 100% profit. Obviously, there may be an exception if you have to provide prizes for it. But anyway, we're going to talk about that uh in a moment. So the most obvious thing to do is to use PE equipment to make a game or some sort of skills challenge or something like that. So, for example, probably the easiest thing that you could do with stuff from your PE shed is to grab some hula hoops and some bean bags. You put the hula hoops on the ground, and the children have to throw bean bags to land inside them. Um, or grab some buckets and throw different things into the bucket. You could even colour coordinate your hula hoops so that you have to land one in the green hula hoop, or you have to get the red bean bag in the bucket. And you just have to use your imagination. Um, or you could do a beat the goalie if you have um goals where your fare is going to be, you can use those. Um, beat the goalie has always been really popular at any event that I've run. Every time I've glanced over to Beat the Goalie, the goalie is looking exhausted because they they're constantly on the go. Um, and that's also a really great um store to try and encourage dads to volunteer for as well. So you may be able to get an extra volunteer who's never volunteered before if you do something like Beat the Goalie. So if you can think of any other more creative ways to use the PE equipment, then that might be good. So it feels a bit different to a PE lesson for the children, and you know, some children just do not like PE, and if they see a store that looks like PE, they might not go to it. So if you can think of any creative ways of using the equipment, but so it doesn't feel like a PE lesson, it might be more appealing to those children. And we found one of our most profitable stores was a competition that we set up between our three um key stages of reception key stage one and key stage two. It was really simple. The children had to score points for their team, whether it's reception, key stage one or key stage two, and the team with the most points won extra playtime in the following week. So what we did was we had three different stations. So the older children had uh a basketball and the actual um basketball hoop that they had to throw the basketball in to score a point. The reception children had hula hoops on the ground and they had to throw beanbags in, and Key Stage One had something in between those two in terms of difficulty, which I can't. Oh, I think it was a hula hoop that was a bit further away along the ground. Um, and the children paid to score as many points as they could, and we had a flip chart next to the stall to display the points for each of those three teams, so you could easily see at any point who was winning. And what was so nice about this is that the children were checking it on a regular basis to see if their team was still in the lead or not, and if it wasn't, they would come back and pay some more money and play again until they'd scored more points. And the children were even going to get their friends and saying, Come on, we've got to go, we've got to we've got to shoot some more baskets, we haven't got enough points. So, um, so to organise a game that children want to play repeatedly is really good for fundraising, um, and it was extremely successful. So, I mean, I think any team challenge is going to be popular, and anything where children can have as many goes as they want is fantastic because their money just rolls in. So, um, another thing you can do once you've emerged from the PE Shared is to check the other equipment you have on the school field. What can you make use of in a creative way for your event? Could you do, for example, a timed challenge on the play equipment? Could you use your wild area for a scavenger hunt? It's it's good to just maybe take a walk around the school grounds and have a look at your existing spaces with a fresh eye and try to think creatively about how you could use them in a different context. Because you never know what you might come up with. And if you need creative ideas, by the way, take some children with you because they're always good at coming up with very different ideas. You can also look at what your PTA has invested in. So you may, as a PTA, have bought resources or assets that you can roll out every year, so make the most of those, make sure you use them. So, an example of this is a hook-a-duck set. I'm sure most PTAs will have a set of uh ducks, and whether you have an official duck paddling pool or a tray that you use, whatever it might be, um, yeah, just make sure you roll it out. And if you feel like you're using it too much, try and change it up. Like one year, try and say you've got to hook a duck with a number two on the bottom, or one year say you've got to try and get three ducks, or you know, I'm sure there's different things you can think of. You might be in possession of a splat the rat kit, you know that game where you have it's basically a drain pipe, and you drop in a rat inverted commas at the top, and the child stands at the bottom of the drain pipe, and they have they have a baton or something in their hand, and they have to hit the rat as it comes out the drain pipe. For anyone who's not in the UK listening to this podcast, splat the rat is a very traditional fate game, it does not ever involve real rats, just let me reassure you on that front. Um, but yes, you do need um a splat the rat kit to make that work. So if you have one, use it. Use it. Um, you could even do splat a teacher, but that doesn't involve hitting them on the head with a baton, that just involves throwing a wet sponge at their face. Um we used to do this quite a lot at our uh fairs a while ago. We uh the village which my school is in has a set of stocks that are kept at somebody's house, and we would uh use the stocks, uh somebody would go in the stocks and then you could throw wet sponges at them. But it uh became increasingly difficult to use the stocks because well, this basically the stocks were extremely heavy, made of solid, solid chunky wood, and we used to have to try and find a couple of volunteers to go and get the stocks from someone's house that lived near the school and walk them over to the playground. And to be honest, just the heartache of trying to find two people who would literally spend 10 minutes going to get these stocks was just got ridiculous. So, in the end, we changed that and we just got a teacher to sit on a chair and um bought some new sponges so they're nice and clean and um just threw sponges at the teacher. But again, if you invest in a bucket and some sponges, you can keep that and do that every year. So that's an asset that you could have. You could ask your school if they have got any extra craft materials that they're trying to get rid of or trying to use up, and you could um gather them all together and then see if you can come up with a craft activity that uses those materials. I think schools do get donated a lot of scraps from people, scrappy bits of fabric or bits of ribbon or something like that. Um, so we did a stall making magic wands one year because we found a load of um little wooden sticks at school and lots of ribbons, so we just really easily got the children to just tie some ribbons onto a stick and they'd made a magic wand. And you know what? It was really, really popular because you could choose the ribbon that you put on, you could even colour in your stick with some felt tip pens, and yeah, they really really loved it. So, um, if your school has anything they want to get rid of to make space for something else, maybe you could turn it into something that you can use at your event. Every school will have something that you can use in terms of equipment or outside space, or maybe something they don't need anymore. You know, schools have science equipment, giant tape measures, they've got all sorts of really cool fun things. So have a go at evaluating your school's potential and just see what you can find. So we've talked about getting donations for stores that you sell and it's 100% profit. We have talked about using assets that you as a PTA or your school already has and using those to get 100% profit. My last, my final category are things that you can make yourself from resources you already have at home. So, um, a classic example of this is to make yourself a tin can alley. So all you have to do here is um collect at least six tins, metal tins that you have baked beans in, or soup in, or something like that. You ex um take off the paper label on the outside of the tin, you re-wrap the tin with paper, and then you decorate the paper normally according to the theme of your event, or you could um just put coloured paper on, so it's just plain coloured paper, and then all you need is a beanbag. Bean bags are so handy at PTA events. Do you know why? Because they don't travel very far when you throw them, they don't bounce and get in the way of other people. So bean bags are really, really useful in this situation. Um so yeah, so you just need a few empty bean or super tins, uh, you relabel them, get a couple of bean bags, and you have a tin can alley game. Um, and it really doesn't take long to put that together, just make sure you wash your tins thoroughly and that they're not sharp at the top, but that's really really easy. Um, I think I've mentioned before that my uh youngest son um likes to do a magic trick store. So he he's interested in magic tricks, he does a lot of tricks with packs of cards, so all he needed to do was bring a couple of packs of cards along. He dressed up like a magician and he sold his magic tricks, so you could pay a pound, I think, to choose a magic trick. He had uh seven different tricks that he could do that he's learnt to do himself, and you could choose one and he would perform it for you, and it was really popular. Um he even had a queue at his stall because that's something really unusual, isn't it? So if you have anyone that has a talent in that in that respect, or if you have a grown-up who is prepared to learn a few magic tricks uh with a pack of cards or whatever, then that that can be really fun and really unusual thing to do. And yes, that does take a bit of preparation beforehand, but again, it's a hundred percent profit for you when people come over. Another stall which I think is absolutely fantastic, is one that I've talked about a few times before, especially in episode 18, where I mentioned some ideas of stalls you can um create just using A4 paper. So, this is one this is the blindfold drawing stall. So you just need lots of A4 paper, you need a blindfold, and you need a pen or a pencil, probably, and you blindfold your customer and you ask them to draw a specific item on the paper. Everybody has to draw the same thing, and then at the end of the fair, you pick the one who was drawing it the best, and we actually had um age categories so that you know you didn't have reception competing with the S6 or anything, and we had a prize for um each age category. We only have three categories, so we just did three prizes, um, and that is really simple. Um, you know, you can just grab your A4 paper out of the photocopier at school and just buy some little prizes, you know. The it's just it's just so much fun, and it it does um it's a nice kind of entertaining stool as well because people. Hang around and watch people draw, and then we pegged up the drawings behind the store because it was indoors, so we could peg it on the um equipment in the hall so everybody could see what everyone else had drawn, which was really exciting, and um I don't know, it's just it was just really entertaining, it created a talking point, and it was it was really fun. So, um, so that's a store that you can make yourself. Um, just need to think of something for the children to draw, which kind of relates to the time of year or the fate or relates to the school in some way. Um, in episode 12, my middle son talks about the coin drop game that he made for our winter fair. So, this again is a game that we made ourselves. We got a giant um plastic tub and uh filled that with water. There's a picture stuck underneath the tub so that you can see it down through the water, and then we just collected some uh two peas, and the aim of the game was to drop the two pee into the water and try and land it in a specific part of the picture, which is a lot harder than you think. And again, this was a game that didn't cost anything to set up, um, and people played it over and over again because they were really determined to try and get the coin onto the picture, and they were trying dropping it in all sorts of different places, so um, yeah, it was a really fun one to do that because when you drop the coin in the water, it goes in a completely random direction, you can't really control um how it moves through the water, but it's fun for people to have a go at that. Then in episode 39, I talked all about different sorts of treasure hunts you can do, and again, that's making up something yourself that requires time to make up, but it is free, and um you can uh yeah, set that up yourself, and that's 100% profit as well, obviously, depending on your prizes. Another idea is that you could just have a stall that's just a junk modeling stall, you could collect loads of recycling, cardboard, all sorts of bits and bobs, and challenge children to make a specific item, um, and then they can take it home, and that is uh 100% profit, and um you should you probably get some really lovely creative uh ideas, and there are some children who will spend hours and hours doing that because they they love that kind of activity. So there there are so many ways you can um make a store yourself that doesn't cost anything, um, you just have to obviously apply time. I suppose that is the cost there, but it is um a volunteer cost, so it's it's free time and um and then it's a hundred percent profit. And of course, whilst most of the ideas we've discussed above do give you a store with 100% profit, you may wish to give out prizes if they are games, and prizes can cost money. And I have in the past spent a lot of time in places like BM bargains picking up sweet prizes and then being concerned that it'll be too many sweets across our entire um event. And is it too many? Is this not very healthy? Oh no, what should I do? Am I spending too much money on them? It can be a bit of a minefield, and I've often got bogged down in trying to work out how much to buy as well. It's it's really, really hard sometimes. I'm actually going to do a separate episode on prizes for games because there's quite a lot to think about, and I personally in my PTA was um never trying to buy any little plasticky things um because I just feel that that's a really bad thing to give to children in terms of the environment. So I was always looking for alternatives to those items, um, and it can be really hard sometimes to think of things and look for things. So I'm going to do an episode um on prizes for games and the time some ideas that you could think about. So do look out for that. Right now, though, there are a couple of easy ways to try and minimize your prize costs to try and keep your stall as close to 100% profit as you can. So uh you may wish to consider these ideas. You could ask parents for donations of what a lot of people call plastic tat. So you could put an amnesty or donation box in school so that parents can just drop off little plastic items that they may have got in crackers, or they may have got from a Happy Mill at McDonald's. I don't actually know if they still do little plastic things there, or they may have got out of a um out of a like an arcade game or something, you know, or from a party bag or anything like that. I know that as a parent, um, we just seem to accumulate these small plastic things. I don't even know where they come from. But anyway, uh bouncy balls, that's another one. We still have so many little bouncy balls. So um again, as parents, we often just want to get rid of some of those things, don't we? And if we can donate them to the school so they can just kind of get recycled, that is great because you're not then buying new, buying more plastic, spending money, you're actually just reusing and redistributing, which is really good. Um, another thing to consider is if the gamer activity allows, try having just a prize for maybe the top three winners rather than a prize for everyone taking part. So that would definitely apply to if you're doing a skills challenge, um, if it's a challenge where you have to time the children to do something, for example, then they can come along, pay to take part, and then now this might be controversial, but I think this is perfectly fine, and I have done this at my school, and it has been perfectly fine. They don't even get sweet for taking part, they take part and give their time, and then obviously the the top three fastest people will win a prize, and and that's okay. It's okay not to have a prize for taking part, let me reassure you. And the third thing to consider is do you really need a prize? Do you need a prize at every stall? Do they need to have a little haribeau after doing everything? They probably don't, and not everybody likes Haribo anyway. Um, so I know that if in the past you have done it that way, it can be hard to move away from that sort of model. Um, but yeah, just consider it. Do you really need to buy prizes for that particular stall or should you concentrate on that particular store which is going to work better with prizes? Anyway, like I said, I'll discuss some more ideas in my episode about prizes, so have a listen to that when it comes out. And that's all I wanted to say at the moment about how to incorporate stalls at your event, which are a hundred percent profit. I think it's great to have these ones up your sleeve as they can balance out any stalls where you've had to buy items to resell, um, but also some of them you can cobble together with short notice. For example, just raiding your P sheds can generate a few stalls, um, and they're still really popular for the children, so um, so they're they're really handy. If you have any other ideas that we could add to this list, then please do let me know. Just drop me an email, it's hello at PTApodcast.com. My um my next episode is going to be all about the weather, which is very topical in term six, as I'm sure you know. If you have an event this term, I know you will be watching those weather forecasts like a hawk, as will many other PTA volunteers too. You are not alone. I hope that helps you feel a bit better. Um, and I just want to issue you with another book review reminder. Please don't forget to review the book. Um, you can see the uh form on my Facebook page or on my website, or you can just email me if you want the link, that's absolutely fine. I can send it out to you. And yeah, I'd love as many of you as possible to tell me what you thought so that I can sort of collate all the comments and reviews for the episode. I'm going to talk about that in. So I hope your event prep and planning continues to go well. If you've got a big summer event coming up, and I will keep my fingers crossed for you that the weather is going to be good on the day, and I will chat to you next time. Bye for now.