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5 reasons to ditch the cash for your next PTA Fundraiser

There’s more to online ticketing than just intrinsic convenience - especially for schools and parent-teacher associations, when time, energy and funding are already at a premium.

a screenshot of a school fair

There’s more to online ticketing than just intrinsic convenience - especially for schools and parent-teacher associations, when time, energy and funding are already at a premium. In the same way that email has more or less superseded letter writing, the use of self-service ticketing has generally replaced the physical box office for event booking. This hasn’t happened by chance either. The ability to sell tickets online has brought a wealth of advantages to what was once a lengthy and sometimes haphazard task for organisers as well as customers. It might not be obvious at first glance, but using an online ticketing service for fundraising events is actually a pretty neat idea.

Setting the scene

Let’s imagine a school fair, organised to raise money for a bursary scheme or to improve a library’s book selection. Kids will love it, but actually making the fair run is a burden for parents and organisers alike, not least because of one particular irritation: physical cash.

Cash is a pain. It’s a pain to carry around, but you’ll need it to pay for activities and to make change at stalls. Cash also needs supervision; it can get lost, it can be stolen, and, worst of all, it has to be properly managed and banked at the end of the day.

Now let’s imagine what would happen if you ditched cash altogether, and sold tickets (or coupons) for individual stalls before the event. On the day you issue buyers with a chit listing their total coupons and cross one off after each activity. Or you can hand out coupons to each purchaser based on how many tickets they've bought, and each stall or activity provider can take their due during the event!

a screenshot of a school fair

The result?

  1. You won’t need to fiddle around with cash
    You won’t need to allocate cash floats for each stall. Children and their parents don’t have to look for change machines, or worry that they have enough money with them. There will be no need to collect and carry that money to the bank at the end of the day.
  2. You won’t need as much security
    The days of worrying about thieves or unattended cash going missing are gone. Attendees have paid online by card and the money is already in the PTA’s PayPal account. If the money had to be counted, you also wouldn’t need to assign observers to make sure it was all there. Except...
  3. You don’t need to count money
    Because you’ve taken advantage of the wonders of e-commerce and computing power. In fact, you know how much you’ve made before the fair has even started. And what’s more…
  4. You know where that money came from
    Yup. Thanks to the marvel of analytics, you’ll be able to see who bought what and when. Instead of having to figure out which stalls at the fair were a success and which weren’t (by painstakingly counting their takings), you can look at a graph.
  5. You can automate administration
    You won’t have planned on mailing out tickets or estimating attendees - and you'll never have to. Customisable emails are sent out automatically right after each purchase is made, complete with useful reminders (“We begin packing up at 7pm”). You’ll even be provided with a check-in list filled with attendees’ details and purchases, ready for printing and distribution.

And so...

If you do decide that an online ticketing system makes sense for your next PTA event, we’d humbly submit that Ticket Tailor is an especially good fit. That’s because we don’t take commission or per-ticket fees, meaning that you won’t lose a percentage of each ticket sold. You can find out more about our pricing here, or if you’d like to chat about the services we offer, just write to [email protected].

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