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All PTAs try to put on as many engaging events as they can, not only to raise some much needed funds for the children at their school, but also to bring a bit of fun in if possible. The Wonka Bar event is a popular one with school PTAs but how does it work?

How It Works

The basic premise is that the PTA sell large chocolate bars at a profit with the chance of people winning prizes by way of finding a lucky golden ticket wrapped in the bar, as happened in the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book/film by Roald Dahl.

Costs

The large chocolate bars cost around £1 each if you can get a good deal from a wholesaler so PTAs tend to sell them for £2 and above, depending on what prizes they have on offer. Prizes can be anything from purely internal e.g. dress down days, lunch with the head, extra playtime etc, which don’t cost anything, to prizes linked to the book e.g. one PTA was lucky enough to get a TV donated as a top prize (Mike TV) plus other prizes related to the characters.

For the PTA that I am on, we had purchased a Kindle Fire HD Kids in the Amazon Prime sale at a very good price so we used that as the top prize. (you can get a 30 day trial of Amazon Prime for free if you want to take part in the Prime Day deals). We also asked local companies to donate chocolate related items (and anything else they were kind enough to give).

What You Need

So – what you need for the Wonka Bar event is as follows:

• chocolate bars (usually the 100g approx large bars – we got some at cost price from our local newsagent)
• wrappers – we created our own by downloading the Willy Wonka font and adding our own logo on. See further down for a template you can use.
• golden tickets – we purchased this paper which worked OK to produce the golden tickets on a standard inkjet printer. You do need to be careful as the ink does smudge if you touch it in the first few minutes so print one sheet at a time and leave it to dry for a bit before cutting. We managed to fit 8 tickets onto each page.
• prizes – could be free school prizes, purchased or requested. We also had a lot of lucky dip winners who got a packet of sweets.

Chocolate

Some wholesalers have the chocolate bars at around the £1 mark – for example HS Wholesale Sweets have them for just under £1. Sometimes Amazon also have deals on and at the moment they have Cadbury’s caramel bars for 92p each (price may have changed when you click the link!) which is as cheap as I have seen them.

Wrappers

This was possibly the most tricky bit – we had bought around 400 chocolate bars so we needed to cover them all.  Some people use A5 to wrap around the bars but this does not totally cover the bar so you can see the ends. We didn’t want to do that as we had different bars and wanted them to be a surprise as to what people got.

So we did A4 wrappers. The main issue on this was printing. Of course you can buy the standard wrappers on Etsy if you want to but this does add extra costs.

We had 2 committee members who had HP instant ink subscriptions with rollover pages left to use. This meant we were able to print the majority of them ourselves effectively for just the cost of the paper. However, you do need to be careful with blocks of colour as this can quickly use up the ink. So in the end we went for a striped background to minimise that.

We were also lucky enough to get some sponsorship from our local estate agent who often helps us out in return for some advertising.

I have uploaded our A4 wrapper here (minus logo and our name) so that you can use it if you wish to. You could also make it smaller and print as 2 on A4 so that you can use as A5.

Just click on the image and it will take you to the full sized one to download.

Organisation

In terms of how the event worked, we sold tickets for Wonka bars over the space of 6 days at the school. As well as people paying by cash, they could also pay online in our SumUp store. They were given a voucher if they paid by cash and had an email confirmation when paying by card online.

Taking orders in advance meant we knew how many chocolate bars to buy. We also ordered spares as we had read on the Facebook groups that there were usually many people who would buy on the day!

We set aside two sessions for people to collect the bars – one after school on a Monday and the other one before school on Tuesday. Most people were able to collect at those times and the ones who couldn’t contacted us to collect. We got the head to mix up all the bars once they were wrapped so that nobody knew where the golden tickets were.

With a school of around 380 children we pre-sold around 220 bars and also sold an extra 50 bars on the day. Some schools sell a lot more than this so it may differ according to how you market it and what prizes you have.

One thing we learned was that the kids loved finding a golden ticket even if it was just for a small prize like a packet of sweets.