How To Successfully Set Up & Run A School Fete This Summer

How To Successfully Set Up & Run A School Fete This Summer – Guest Post

A summer fete is a perfect way to meet other families, enjoy yourself and raise some money for your child’s school or nursery. While it may seem like a relatively straight-forward activity, there is actually a lot of preparation and hard work required to ensure that it is a success. You will also need an awful lot of patience and spare time!

If your school fete is going to be fairly large, then you will no doubt be working with others as part of a small team; this is where you will need to have the ability to multi-task and skills in managing other people. You will also have to be prepared to promote the event as well so that as many people attend as possible.

Make a Plan

There are numerous elements that you need to take into consideration when you are putting your initial plan together. You need to take some to time to ascertain how big you would like the event to be and whether or not you have a suitably sized venue for your fete. This is also a good time to take the furniture that you will need into consideration; you are going to be need a good number of chairs and foldable tables for your stalls and for those attending the fete.

It is also important to ensure that you are not having the fete on the same day as any other major event in the area. This could leave you with a smaller crowd than you would like. Once you have got all of these in place, you can start assembling your team and being the structure of the fete together.

It goes without saying that you will need to start collating items to sell, or to give away as prizes. A good way to go about this is to approach local businesses in the area and offer them publicity in exchange for donating goods to your fete. You will also need to develop some initial ideas about the food that you plan to sell or give away.

Decide on Your Attractions

It is a good idea to decide on particular attractions for your fete relatively early in the planning stages so that you can start to tempt local families. This will include ensuring that you have suitable activities for both adults and children. This is a particularly important point as you want to hold everyone’s attention for the duration of the day.

If you have little ones yourself then you will be no doubt be aware that the prospect of fun and games seem to sufficiently captive their attention. This means that there are plenty of ways to keep them entertained. Hiring a bouncy castle from a reputable and trusted vendor will always go down well, along with other activities such as fancy dress and face painting. In terms of the adults, stalls like a tombola or raffle, along with a BBQ will always go down especially well!

Get the Supplies In

As I am sure that you are aware, the main purpose of a summer fete should be to raise money for an organisation in need or to raise awareness for a particular cause. However, this means that you need to be incredibly careful to ensure that any outgoings are kept to an absolute minimum.

As mentioned earlier, a good place to start would be to approach local businesses and companies in the area asking them for publicity at the fete in exchange for a free product that could be used as a prize or some food. You may be surprised just how receptive businesses can be in these situations due to the fact that they will have the opportunity to get their products and name in-front of a new audience.

If you decide to include an auction at your fete, then you could ask fellow parents to cook cakes or other desserts to use as prizes. This is fun activity that excites people and always seems to generate interest and helps to raise much needed funds.

This is a guest post. Image source: Geograph.