PTO Fundraising Chairs, are you tired of the usual pizza dine to donate nights but completely exhausted by the thought of cooking a massive school dinner?
Do you want a fundraising win that doesn’t involve scrubbing giant sauce pots in the school kitchen at 10pm?
Are you looking for a fun way to get parents excited about supporting your school without begging for favors?
Sounds like a spaghetti dinner fundraiser may be for you!
And that’s just what we’re talking about in this post.
Read on for all the details of how to run a spaghetti dinner fundraiser for your PTO school parent group!
Finding Your Restaurant Partner
First things first, you’ve got to find the right local restaurant to partner with.
Teaming up with a local restaurant or caterer is a smart way to make this fundraiser happen easily.
You and your PTO team are likely not professional chefs or restauranteurs with the knowledge or skill to pull off dinner for a large scale of people.
Call around to local spots in your town and pitch this as a total win-win.
Partnering with professionals in the food service business is a great marketing opportunity for them because it drops a ton of new customers right at their door, and your PTO gets a cut of the sales.
Setting the Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser Menu
When you’re setting up the menu for the spaghetti dinner fundraiser, you’ve got to keep it interesting.
Families aren’t going to go through extra hoops to buy dinner from you if it’s something they can easily whip up at home or grab at a drive-thru.
Work with the restaurant or caterer to develop an awesome menu that includes great options for meat lovers, but don’t forget the vegan or vegetarian options too so nobody feels left out.
Giving families a taste of something different is a refreshing change from standard fundraisers, and it makes people actually want to literally step up and buy a plate.
Work with the restaurant to offer a mix of tried and true favorites.
Offer the ability for families to scale up their dinner for large families or heavy eaters.
The times my PTO has organized a spaghetti dinner fundraiser, we offered pasta with either a tomato or meat sauce, with a side salad and garlic bread.
There was also an option to add chicken, meatballs or Italian sausages and peppers to orders.
Protecting Your Fundraiser Profit Margin
Let’s talk about the money, because if this event isn’t actually making a healthy profit, then your time will be better spent organizing a different fundraiser altogether.
To make it worth all the energy it takes to organize and publicize the fundraiser, you need to clear at least $4 to $5 per plate.
If the proposed profit level is less than that, don’t be afraid to ask the restaurant manager for an additional discount to boost your margins.
Remember, you’re delivering guaranteed business to their kitchen all on one night.
If the math doesn’t work out to a decent profit after a few conversations, that’s your signal to find a new partner.
The spaghetti dinner fundraiser won’t be worth your time otherwise.
Setting Up a Low-Friction Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser
A spaghetti dinner fundraiser has the potential to get quite complicated, but there are several things you can do combat this!
Accept Pre-Orders
First, do yourself a huge favor and make it incredibly easy for people to participate in the fundraiser.
Set up an online order form that lets parents pay online right then and there.
Whatever you do, do not set it up so people have to email a volunteer to get the payment details or cash drop-off instructions.
That’s a fast track to absolute chaos, messy tracking and disappointing participation.
Pre-selling the dinners online gives you a perfect headcount for the restaurant and locks in your fundraising cash upfront.
Offer Community
If you’re looking to combine the spaghetti dinner with a family fun event, say dinner and a movie, reserve your school’s cafeteria for the evening.
The restaurant can provide trays of food that you can set up buffet line style to serve the crowd quickly.
You can offer upsells like beverages and desserts.
If your PTO sells spirit wear, make sure to have a table with your wares stocked to give attendees an opportunity to purchase items for upcoming PTO sponsored spirit days.
Offer Drive Thru Service
Another way to ease the workload on you and your fellow PTO volunteer is to make the spaghetti dinner pick up a drive-thru experience.
On the night of the event, families skip entering the school entirely.
Station a few volunteers to hand off meals in a parking lot pick up lane.
Or families can drive directly to the restaurant to grab their hot food.
Both of these options make for a nearly mess-free, light volunteer need fundraiser.
Advertising Beyond the School Gates
Make sure you pick a date that’s far out enough (usually four to six weeks) to give your committee plenty of time to advertise and get community members hungry for this fundraiser.
If you only post it once in the school folder or drop it at the bottom of a long email, the fundraiser is going to flop.
Get the event details on the school website and in the next school newsletter to capture internal support, but don’t stop there.
Blast it out on Facebook, share it in local community Facebook groups, and post it on Nextdoor.
You can even contact your city office and see if they’ll help you publicize the dinner to the wider neighborhood.
This is an event community members will happily support, so be sure they know about it so they can do just that!
Here are 21 ways to publicize this fundraiser.
Over to You
Switching up your parent group’s fundraising calendar with a spaghetti dinner fundraising night is such an awesome way to slash the workload while still making a great profit.
It keeps parents happy, protects your volunteers from getting overextended, and supports a local business all at once.
You’ve totally got this, so go out there and make your next spaghetti dinner fundraiser night a massive success!
Even More Help
If you’re gearing up for your next big school fundraising campaign and want to stop winging it, check out the Fundraising Success Kit.
It’s packed with ready-to-use templates, campaign timelines, and tracking tools that take the anxiety out of raising money:
Ready to dive more into the work of PTO and school fundraising, but wish you could have a plan of action ready at your fingertips?
Time to learn more about the Fundraising Success Kit!
It’s never been easier to hold highly profitable school fundraisers using these customizable strategies and step by step plans that work for every type of parent group, and any type of fundraiser, from a traditional catalog to A-thon Fundraisers and everything in between.
This resource is guidance plus a complete plan walking through the entire process of fundraising for your school, including a publicity plan, templates, forms and a planner kit to help you get outrageously organized in a snap!
