Instead of baking a bunch of goodies and holding a bake sale event, think about pre-selling your items via a flyer with attached order form. The benefit of selling your items this way is that you aren’t limited to one specific day and window of time to hold your event. People don’t always carry cash and you don’t want to miss out on sales because someone can’t pay for your items right there and then. Another good thing is that you will also know exactly how much you need to bake to fill the orders that you receive. A great way to do this is to hand out flyers or post them in public locations with tear off order forms. Pick a few items to sell and let people order in advance the type and quantity of treats that they want.
A friend of mine who was raising money for a church event made three different types of cookie: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin and sugar cookies. She then boxed them in sets of half dozen for $4 and one dozen for $6. She ended up raising over $1000! She said chocolate chip cookies were the biggest seller and she said most people choose to order the full dozen box of cookies. She got inexpensive plastic containers to package the cookies, but since presentation wasn’t a factor in the sales, you don’t have to dress up your items. Just bake high quality cookies so that everyone is happy with their purchase. If you run the sale for a few weeks and deliver your cookies once a week, you can also get multiple orders and reorders from the same people.
I’ve created a free bake sale order form template flyer with attached order form that you can use for this type of fundraiser. It’s in Microsoft Word document format so you can easily customize it. I have some photos of cookies on the flyer, but you can replace them with pictures of the items that you decide to sell. Don’t get overly complicated or make too many things. Sticking to one type of item like cookies, cupcakes, breads, pies or cakes and then offer a few different flavors is the way to go!