Monday, November 8, 2010

Spaghetti Dinner Tickets

A sample of the tickets is at the bottom of this blog post. We created it in Microsoft Word by inserting "rows" to format the page. We created a fundraising logo of sorts to make it fun. The tickets were important because family and friends wanted to "pre-sell" the tickets before the event. Originally we only planned to sell tickets at the door which I do not recommend.

We tried very hard to recruit family/friends to sell tickets wherever they could (work, school, even during errand-running). This worked ok but would’ve worked better had we started selling tickets at least 2 months prior. You could also ask your church if you could sell them before/after services. If they are not willing to provide a fundraising location, at least they may be willing to let you sell your tickets on location.

Something we didn’t do was offer to mail tickets to people. We thought the expense might be too high with postage. But, you could offer to send an electronic version of the ticket if you know a lot of people online. You could send the tickets in a PDF format if you are nervous about them being duplicated. As far as preventing a photocopy, only a watermark would work there. Each ticket has a specific ticket number which is important if you decide to sell your tickets to strangers within your neighborhood/community- you never know with some people. If you would like any document converted into a PDF format without having to pay for it, go to: www.cutepdf.com/ and download the Free download under the title, PDF Creation. My husband and I have both used this program and it works pretty well. Honestly though, I wouldn’t bother with electronic tickets as long as you make the tickets available at the door of your event and you aren’t trying to get a food count.

If you notice on the left side of the tickets, they are numbered. These number combinations aren’t random. We wanted a numbering system that people wouldn’t be able to duplicate easily, but would be easy to keep track of (because we were selling tickets to complete strangers). Our combination was a 12 number combination derived from combining family member’s dates of birth with the last 3 saved for specific ticket count, i.e.- 001,002,003, and so on. If you are not concerned with numbering tickets and do not plan to sell tickets to strangers then a cute numbering idea is using: “JAMES1:27” in place of any numbering combination. We used this for the tickets we sold at the door.

All tickets were printed on card stock (you can use any color) and we used a straight edge paper cutter to cut out each individual ticket. We printed 6 per 8.5x11 sheet of paper.

A sample is below:

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