Adding a Limo Ride or Pizza Party to Your School Fundraiser

One of the best ways to increase sales and raise more money is to add additional prize incentives. For instance, young sellers get very excited at the idea of getting to ride in a big limousine or going to a big pizza party; so as a result, a lot of sellers compete for this special incentive by selling more items. This is a great way to add yet another element of excitement to your fundraiser, so we highly encourage you to consider it.

If you decide to add a limo ride or pizza party to your prize program, you may be wondering, does it make financial sense to add a limo ride or pizza party? The short answer is, yes.

Let’s take the limo lunch as the example. Most schools that add a limo usually rent it for 2 hours, and to really make it exciting, lunch is usually included as well. The cost of renting a limo usually ranges between $60-100 per hour. Since most limos hold 8-10 people, you are looking at around $25.00 per seller (on the high end). If you also incorporate lunch you can plan on adding in an additional $2.00-$3.00, or more, per seller depending on where you want to take them. Make sure that you do your homework and check around for the best value ahead of time.

Still, you can recoup your limo costs and even make additional profit by simply making sure that your sellers sell enough items in order to qualify. Here are two different ways that you can do it:

1. Top 8-10 sellers get to go to lunch in a limo.

• The advantage of using this approach is that you are guaranteed to fill the limo and thus take full advantage of your investment.
• The disadvantage to this approach is that you have not set a minimum number of items that have to be sold to qualify. Thus it is possible to have sellers who sell less than you might expect qualify.

2. Everyone who sells ‘X’ items gets to go to lunch in a limo. Make sure that whatever item number you use as the qualifier that you pick the number that will give you the best results. If your number is too high, say 50 items, you may discourage students from trying for it. If your number is too low, say 10 items, then you will have too many students qualifying and your expenses will increase accordingly. To determine what item number to use, assume that you will make about $4.00 profit per item. Multiply that number by the various item numbers that you plug in to determine your gross profit and then subtract out your expenses to get your net profit. Make your final item number choice based on whatever net profit you think you can live with.

• The advantage to using this approach is that everyone who qualifies has made you at least ‘X’ net profit even after covering you limo and lunch expenses.
• The disadvantage to this approach is you might not fill your limo, depending on how many sellers reach ‘X’ items sold. Or, you may have more than enough sellers who reach ‘X’ items and thus you may have to end up either shuttling your sellers using one limo or renting an additional limo.

Regardless of which you choose, remember that your goal is to maximize your sales, so no matter how well you recoup costs from the event itself, any significant increase in overall sales will make it fun and worthwhile. The key is to actively promote it to your sellers every day while your fundraiser is in progress. Some organizations even make arrangements to have the limo at the kick-off to really get their sellers excited!