Top Tips to Running a Santa's Grotto, Toys to You

Top Tips to Running a Santa's Grotto

Top Tips for a Fundraising Santa's Grotto

Keep it Simple
Yes, children are impressed by gorgeous fairy lights, spectacular settings, reindeer and fake snow, but who has time to source, organise and create all these special effects? And the reindeer are almost guaranteed to poo on the floor of the Grotto! Do you want to be the person who draws the short straw for cleaning up at the end of the event? I know I wouldn’t!
Children are delighted with a simple Christmassy setting so long as Father Christmas is there and
he has a gift for them.
We all know that when the children happy, the parents are happy too!

Keep it Affordable
Affordable can also be impressive.
To create a special Santa setting, it’s best to recruit as many volunteers as possible and to get
them painting the scenery. It’s easy to paint some MDF and to turn it into a fabulous Santa’s
Grotto; all you need to do is paint the wood to look either like a brick wall or a log cabin wall with a window to a snow scene. And put up some red curtains that the children have to walk
through to see Santa.
The best bit is: if you do it one year and store it somewhere safe it’s there to use year after year.
Santa needs a simple chair and a couple of Santa sacks or to keep it even cheaper you could
consider gift wrapping a couple of cardboard boxes to keep the presents in.
To help Santa along you can even colour code the boxes: blue paper for boys, red for girls.

Fundraising with a Santa's Grotto
It is perfectly acceptable to charge for visits to Father Christmas.
Shopping centres and department stores charge upwards of £3.50 (usually it’s substantially more) so you can quite happily charge £1.50 and more to see Father Christmas and get a gift.
Buy a book of raffle tickets and get parents to book slots to see Santa in advance. Each ticket
represents their dedicated Santa time. Remember to write the time on the back so the little nes
don’t forget!
To make more money ask a parent with a digital camera to take pictures. You can then sell those pictures to the parents. Take orders and payment on the day. Hand them out at school
once they’re printed.
It’s so cheap to print digital images, sometimes only 5p per photo; you can make a good profit
selling these.

Gifts From Santa
These needn’t cost you a fortune either. You could give little bags of oatmeal tied with a
ribbon and a tag saying "Please put this out on Christmas Eve for Rudolph and his friends. Thank you, Santa."
Or you could buy toys from Toys to You where you’ll find wooden Santa Grotto toys from only 90p and story books from only £1.10. If you buy your toys from us we’ll throw in free gift wrap and colour coding to save you time and money.
If you choose to give wooden toys or books from Santa you can happily charge a bit more to see Santa as these toys have a high perceived value by parents

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