UNB - Fredericton Canada Day Fundraiser Success!

Every year we kick off our campaign with a Canada Day fundraiser during the city’s Canada Day celebrations in the downtown area. We set up a vendor’s tent where we sell cotton candy, popcorn, pop, water, and pass out Shinerama helium balloons to kids. We also get our Student Union’s mascot (SU the Fox) to walk around at various points during the day passing out Shinerama stickers and tattoos to kids. They love it!

We started this event four years ago with just a little table where we didn’t raise that much money. Every year since, we’ve been able to buy pieces of equipment that help us grow in our professionalism, which makes parents more apt to buy from us. We have now acquired a really nice table and set of chairs, a 10’x10’ canopy to shelter us from sun and rain and our own Shinerama banner to hang up!

We’ve also been very lucky to find someone in the city to lend us their own popcorn and cotton candy machines, as well as all of the popcorn salt, oil and sugar flavouring. As well, all of the pop and water we sell is donated from our Student Union’s Pepsi Promotions Fund. It is in our school’s exclusive Pepsi contract that they donate $16,000 to be used as they see fit. This year they donated $200 to our Shinerama campaign, which we used to buy 18 cases of pop and 18 cases of water. We sold the pop and water for a $1 apiece, leaving us only to buy sugar and popcorn kernels! The reason that we’ve had such success with this fundraiser is because profit margins are ridiculous! A 2Kg bag of sugar costs $2.50, which makes approximately 50 bags of cotton candy (medium size freezer bags that are not zip-locked), which is then sold for $2 apiece!

Our event was not without its hiccups of course! We spent the first hour without HYDRO! Thankfully, five people from our team met the previous night and made enough cotton candy to fill five Rubbermaid totes, which we were able to sell in the hour. This year, we were also able to make an agreement with the city to be the only cotton candy vendor at the event.

In the eight hours that we were open (11am-7pm) we had a seven hour line up that did not stop and a 30 minute wait for our cotton candy which lasted ALL DAY LONG! This allowed us to almost double our Canada Day fundraiser from $700 last year, to $1275.59 this year!

Lauren Vail
2010 Shinerama Director, University of New Brunswick - Fredericton
Twitter: @UNB_Shinerama
Facebook: UNB Shinerama