Tips and Tricks for Hosting a Library Bake Sale

We recently held a bake sale at a local restaurant as part of a fundraising night. It went so well I thought I would share some tips with you all, in case you are interested in holding one to benefit your library. In these tight times every penny counts, and a bake sale is a great way to bring in a little extra cash.

Here are a few of my tips and tricks:

• Get a little help from your Friends! Our Friends of the Library was a huge help in staffing our bake sale. They also baked quite a bit of the baked goods we sold. All I had to do was mention the bake sale at our Friends meeting and follow up with a reminder a few days before.
• Try to get a wide variety of baked goods. I thought we had a pretty good selection, however we did end up with a few too many chocolate based treats. This was a bit of a bummer for the few people who showed up wanting something not chocolate. (Surprisingly, those people do exist!)
• Make sure everybody (staff, Friends, etc) individually bags everything they bake. The majority of those who contributed to our bake sale thought to do this, but I did end up having to repackage a few items the day of.
• Price the majority of items at the same price point. I started with all items a dollar, then separately priced a handful of select items slightly higher or lower. Doing it that way saved me the time of individually pricing every item.
• Make sure to bring bags for people to take items home. We had some on hand, but definitely not enough.
• Bring flyers and other promotional materials to advertise library events and services. I brought flyers to advertise our upcoming Summer Reading Program, and ended up giving quite a few away.
• Drop prices towards the end of the bake sale. Towards the end of the bake sale we started basically giving people half off everything, just to make sure it all sold by the end of the night. As a result we ended up with a minimal amount of leftovers.

If you've also held a bake sale to benefit your library (or have any other creative fundraising ideas) I would love to hear from you!