Easter Egg Hunt

With Easter right around the corner (Sunday, April 1), it’s the perfect time for an Easter Egg Hunt! This can be a great way to raise money for your course fee, especially if you can get local elementary schools or church groups involved. You want to make sure to research what existing Easter Egg Hunts already exist in your area; if the market’s saturated, then choose a different fundraising event. But if there aren’t that many local Easter Egg Hunts, then feel free to launch your own! You could also consider creating a more “grown-up” Easter Egg Hunt and marketing it to local high school students.

1. Find a location.
Before you start planning your Easter Egg Hunt, you need to find a location where you can hide your eggs! Your high school might be willing to let you hide eggs in an outdoor area, or you might be able to convince a small local park to let you schedule an event. Also look into local community centers, sports fields, office spaces, and even private homes, including your own! Make sure that the area is safe for children, and doesn’t include any areas where they could fall, trip, or be accosted. You don’t want to schedule your Easter Egg Hunt for the holiday weekend. Instead, consider the weekend before (March 23-25) to maximize your attendance numbers.

2. Buy plastic eggs and candy.
Go to Oriental Trading Company and buy some plastic eggs. Right now, you can get a 144 pack for less than $10. You also want to grab some cheap candy from your local dollar store or Costco. If you want to host a more “grown-up” Easter Egg Hunt, you can collect donated gift cards and merchandise from local businesses. So some of your eggs would contain the traditional candy, while others would include a slip of paper with a number. That number would correspond to a reward, which students would then claim at an event table (ex. the slip of paper labeled 3 would get the student a $20 gift certificate to the local movie theatre).

3. Market your egg hunt.
Hang up flyers around the community, like on bulletin boards and in storefront windows of local businesses. Drop off flyers to be passed out at local schools and see if you can make an announcement over the PA system. You can also ask adults to hang up flyers in their workplaces, so that parents know when your event will be happening. You might even be able to get your flyers copied for free at your high school. Consider submitting an event listing to your local newspaper as well! You want to keep your admission fee at about $5 per child, and every child can continue hunting until they find an egg. Finding three eggs ends the game for that particular child. Any child who wants to continue the hunt after those initial three eggs will need to buy another chance to do so.

4. Hide the eggs. (Make a map!)
When you’re hiding your plastic eggs on the day of the event, you want to make a map of where they all are. That way, if you have a disappointed student who hasn’t been able to find an egg, you can steer him/her in the right direction. That will keep all of the children participating in your hunt happy (along with their parents!). You also want to make sure that you’re not accidentally leaving plastic eggs around once you’ve wrapped up your hunt. You’re probably going to want to get some volunteers onboard for the actual event. Not only will you need help hiding the eggs and re-stocking hiding places throughout the day, you’ll also want to make sure that the children are supervised throughout the hunt, particularly so that they’re not finding and taking more than three eggs each. Otherwise, you’re going to run out of eggs way too quickly!

5. Create add-on events.
Easter Egg Hunts provide lots of opportunities for you to make some extra cash in additional to the admission fee. If you can get a costume donated, you might want to consider having a volunteer dress up like the Easter bunny and provide photo ops for a small donation. You can also set up a bake sale station and sell bunny-themed refreshments or host an egg decorating competition (where children bring their pre-decorated eggs to be judged by a panel) or even play a few rounds of bunny bingo! (We’ll be posting about bingo nights next week; you can get all of the supplies you need to make one happen for less than $10.) Charge a small additional fee for all of these activities, and you’ll find each child’s value adding up to $10+ for the afternoon. Get 120 children coming out for your Easter Egg Hunt, and you’re $1,200 closer to your fundraising goal!