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School Nights (Pizza nights)

J

j_r0kk

New member
Are any of you doing school nights in your stores? I’ll share a little info with you to get your sales up and your customer base up as well… if you don’t already know of course. Here’s a rough copy of a flyer to send out to the schools:

Here’s how it works:
  1. Pick a night for your Pizza Night fundraising event – any Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday night. For best results, please allow a minimum of 2-3 weeks to plan your fundraising event.
  2. To set up a Pizza Night event for your school, call (insert Store name and your phone number)
  3. Next, you will have a copy of the school night flyer sent to you via e-mail in a PDF format. Simply print the number of flyers you will need for the pre-night preparation and for the day of the designated night.
  4. Pre-night preparation – 7 days prior to the designated Pizza Night, send flyers home in each students backpack letting parents know the Pizza Night will be exactly a week away.
  5. The build up – Each teacher should participate in the Pizza Night by creating excitement with the students throughout the week leading up to the Pizza Night.
  6. Pizza Night! – Flyers are sent home in each students backpack informing the parents of the Pizza Night.
  7. The payoff - We will calculate sales generated from the school for the entire day of Dine In, Carryout, and Delivery orders. At the end of the day the classroom counts will be tallied and the winning classroom will be announced the following school day. A check for 20% of net sales will be processed the following week. The check will be payable to your school and attentioned to the coordinator unless otherwise specified.
I’ve found this to be a great marketing tool. You don’t have to guess at how much return you’re going to get on marketing dollars spent. You already know that for every dollar you spend in marketing you’re going to get $5.00 in sales. Right now I’m working on setting it up for all my schools in town. The trick is to NOT burn the schools out! Do this once per month per school. If you’ve got eight elementary schools then you can have a “school night” twice a week, raising your sales an average of about $1,000/week.

One word of caution: get your checks to the school as quickly as possible! Unless, of course, you want to piss 'em off and never want to do anything with them again. Any questions? Ideas? Comments? -J_r0kk
 
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One question and one idea…

Question: Who do contact at the school with the idea? I am wanting to approach the schools in our area about Pizza Nights and I am never sure who to talk to. Do you mail information to the schools or do you take it in person? Any answers would be appreciated!

Idea: We just did two Wednesday night Pizza Nights for the school that my kids go to (it was easy to figure out who to contact there!) and they were very successful. We were raising money for a 4th grader who has cancer. But what really added to the success and the fun was that we invited the principal and some of the teachers to volunteer in the restaurant those nights. They basically seated people, delivered pizzas to the tables, and cleaned off the tables. It was a lot of fun because the kids liked seeing their teachers outside of the classroom. This worked especially well in this case because I knew the principal and teachers and they knew me, but I know it would be just as fun to do it with other schools too.

Just some thoughts…

Thanks!

Sara
 
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SaraH,

Always call the school and ask who’s in charge of fundraising. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, they’ll give you a name and phone number. Most times you’re not that lucky, though. Once you find out the contact (generally the president of the PTO or PTA) you can go to the school with a flyer describing the “Pizza Night” and ask to put it in his/her box.

You’ve GOT to be persistent, though. They ALWAYS blow you off the first 2 or 3 times before you get through to them. PM me your e-mail addy and I’ll send you a PDF of the flyer I use. -J_r0kk
 
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j_r0kk:
  1. The payoff - We will calculate sales generated from the school for the entire day of Dine In, Carryout, and Delivery orders. At the end of the day the classroom counts will be tallied and the winning classroom will be announced the following school day.
Click to expand...
How do you know if the sales are from the school?

I do the same program the school picks a day, but I have the parents send the reciepts to the school (They have 1 week to submit) and the kids drop off the reciept in the box sitting on the main office counter where everbody can see it (Isupply the box with my logo on it) They then tally it up, i go and pick it up and confirm amounts then send them a check.
 
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For my program I contact the principal and ask them if they would like to see how I can help them raise money and they either look at it or give me the contact person. I Actually have a whole program I bring to each school at the begining of the year that includes Hot lunch, catering and fundraising programs with a letter to the principal.
That works the best.
 
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j_r0kk,

Would you mind sending me a copy of that flyer also?
I really like that Idea, makes me wish my daughter school was closer to my pizzeria. It would be nice to start off with a school I know…=)
 
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pizzaguy,
Code: 
 I've got a POS system here (Point Of Success) and I've set it up so there are 6 types of orders:
Delivery
Dine In
Carryout
S.Delivery
S.Dine In
S.Carryout

When the parents order for, let’s say for example, delivery, we hit the S.Delivery button. At the end of the night we run a report called “Customer Purchase History Summary”. This tells us what kind of service the customer got from is (i.e. delivery, carryout, S.Delivery, S.Carryout, etc.). We can add up the totals there to make sure the sheets of paper we get from the customers match up with the orders. If they don’t match, we go with the larger total and use the sheets to find out the winning class. Hope this helps. -J_r0kk.
 
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We attach a fundraiser coupon to the bottom of the flyer that they present during the pizza night. When they pay at the counter our staff knows to include their POS receipt in the fishbowl if they are handed a coupon…of course we have alot of people that forget and we still include it anyways…we have had instances where the organization did not do any PR for the event and thought they can just hand out flyers to everyone outside. Make sure that you have rules that no promotion for the event is to take place within the vicintiy of your establishment on the night of your event to prevent you from losing regular sales. We donated 25% of sales and have found the average night to raise approx $400.
Since we started delivery we have abandoned fundraiser nights (got a bit crazy) and started a gift debit-card fundraiser that is on an ongoing basis where 15% is kicked back for every gift card sold ($3 for every $20 gift card). The groups sell them at school functions throughout the year and we dont get slammed all at once which works out much better. My POS has a gift card module which enables us to swip in our own custom-printed gift cards and the balance is printed on their receipt.
 
I have found out that working with the school Booster clubs work out real well. They are always looking to raise money. Usually for athletics.
 
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