Bake Sale Success!

A week ago I posted about the basket raffle fundraiser we did for the church children's choir.  As part of the overall fundraiser, we did a bake sale on Super Bowl Sunday.  I learned a lot and wanted to share my top ten tips for a great bake sale:

1.  Keep it simple - don't spend a lot of time (or money) making complicated specialty items.  Make the specialty items only if they are easy and you can make a lot.

2.  Make it appealing - Spend less time making your brownies super special and more time packaging them in an attractive way - pretty platter, great packaging

3.  Make individual servings or groupings, but don't price your items for less than $1.00.  You'll make more money, get a better return on your investment and won't have to deal with lots of change.

4.  Although the majority of your items should be individual servings, make sure to have some bigger servings or full cakes/breads to purchase.

5.  Plan your bake sale around a holiday or theme.  This works especially well if your "holiday" is an event where people might bring items to someone else's house (this worked well for Super Bowl Sunday with theme cakes).  You can also plan around events (football games, carnivals, craft fairs).

6.  Don't be afraid to ask your local grocery store to donate items.  We received a bunch of great items (mostly cakes and pies) from our Albertsons.

7.  Make your display table attractive and not too cluttered.  A table piled with items is a bit overwhelming to your customers.

8.  Coordinate your volunteer bakers so you don't end up with all brownies or chocolate chip cookies.

9.  Consider including "non-baked" items like fudge, salty-sweet (Chex) mixes, chocolate covered strawberries and ready-made mixes in a jar.  You may also consider serving drinks.

10.  Make sure your customers know why you're fundraising.  Once we let our customers know we were raising money for the children's choir, some people just walked up and donated money.

Have some fun!

cindy