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As the Popcorn Friday chairperson for my local Parent Teacher Organization, I was able to take over the reins on a smooth running fundraiser. I was fortunate enough to work with awesome parent volunteers who were the oil in the machine. Read on to find 5 tips for organizing a successful Popcorn Friday for your school. We held the fundraiser every Friday morning. We sold small brown bag sized popcorn, silver dollar jerky, candy, and juice. All of the items sold for $.25 each. This is our school's biggest money maker and gives everyone another reason to love the last working day of the week! There is nothing like the taste of delicious, buttery popcorn from a quality machine.
Tip #1: Purchase large plastic bins with lids that are attached and close like flaps on a box. In each bin, you will have a container for the money, a laminated class list with a dry erase pen, and a container for the jerky. Buy a 3-ring binder to hold instructions for volunteers, schedules, and copies containing fill-in-the-blank areas for counting the amount sold for each item. This is organized by teacher. Here, you will be able to tally how much money you made that day. Volunteers simply organized the money to make it easier to count. The office staff was in charge of counting it.
Tip #2: Purchase popcorn supplies. Assuming you already have a popcorn machine, you will need popcorn kernels, oil, butter flavored salt, brown paper bags, plastic produce bags, and paper towels. Don't forget your candy and jerky. We purchased small containers of juice from the district hot lunch program.
Tip #3: Organize schedules and volunteers. Have your P.T.O help you round up a list of volunteers.
We assigned a group of four to one Friday a month for the whole year. One person came early to begin popping the popcorn. The others came after dropping off their kids. After school started, the teacher would tally the amount of items to be purchased, collect the money and fill out her laminated class list so that she would know who gets what. The teacher would then send 2 students down to the cafeteria with the bin and drop it off for the popcorn volunteers. As soon as the bins came in, we dumped the money into our money box, filled their bin with what they ordered, and filled out our tally sheet for that class. Then, we simply left the bins stacked up for the classrooms to pick up before lunch.
Tip #4: Reward your helpers: We always popped a big bowl of popcorn for the teacher's lounge and sent small bags down to the office staff and lunch ladies. We saved a couple of big bags for the janitors who were so wonderful in helping set up our machines and tables each Friday. As a reward, we also reserved small bags of popcorn for the student V.I.P.'s of the week. We made sure to send our volunteers home with a bag of popcorn and a big thank you. There was also a classroom popcorn party prize held each month for the class that had the most parents at the monthly P.T.O. meeting.
Tip #5: Keep on top of things. Take inventory and do your shopping ahead of time so that volunteers will not run out of essential items. Remind your volunteers about their shifts for the first couple of months and then tell them to mark their calendars. There is no need to babysit them. They are adults and should be responsible to carry out their jobs. Give volunteers a substitute list of people to call if they can't make it. Be available, just in case the best laid plans don't work out. Don't forget to assign people to the fifth Fridays, as well as Thursday poppers for weeks when there is no school on a Friday.
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