Vendors can be tricky, here’s 5 tips I have learned {I use the word vendor for when we are using an outside company to provide an activity for the kids, we will have another post coming up talking about food vendors}:
1. People don’t care that you’re a non-profit, they will screw you over as quick as you will let them. We’ve had vendors walk away with all their profit, regardless of our contract. We finally had to come to terms with this and work around it by a) Realizing that may happen and letting that part go. b)Working with businesses that have a real stake in the area and that I could badmouth really easily if necessary. 🙂
2. We used to do a TON of bouncers, and we changed that a couple of years ago. Right now we concentrate on paying for 3 or 4 activities that have either tradition or are really fun. This year we used:
- rock wall
- game truck
- Dunk Tank
- Balloon Twisters
These are different (our balloon twisters are AMAZING, always a line for them!), they include all the kids of all ages and we feel like we get a good “bang for our buck”
3. Have a contract. We try to book our vendors about 4 months ahead of time. We get it all in writing, and we hound them for a contract until they give us one {or we pick someone else}.
4. We don’t spend an excessively large amount of time getting bids. We do a little bit of that, but our time is valuable and we need vendors that will provide a safe, happy experience for our family. If they have done that in the past, it is likely they will do it again!
5. Spread them out. Our vendor activites tend to be our most popular, so we sprinkle them around our carnival venue so we don’t have pockets with a LOT of people. Our amazing vendor chairs use Google Maps to take an image of our school grounds, and then map out where everything is going to be using photo shop. That’s nice, because it’s {obviously} already to scale.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on vendors. Anyone else have any tips?
Be sure to check out my whole PTO carnival series.
Food
Kelle says
Did I miss something. You said there was 10 tips on vendors, I only see 5. It started of as a good read but even bad movies have an ending..
Hilary says
Oh my goodness! You’re COMPLETELY right! I messed that one up. I will have to blame it on the fact that I ran the carnival. 🙂 It took way too many of my brain cells. 🙂 Thanks for pointing it out, fixing it right now!
Tara says
Did you post 6-10 in a different place?
Hilary says
Well, phooey — did I write there were 10 tips somewhere? Let me know so I can fix it…. be sure to check my other carnival posts. 🙂