What’s the best thing about a book fair? It’s a lot of hard work putting them together, but the end result is fun. If you know the right way to approach and plan a school book fair event, things will be easy right from the beginning.

First things first – and that is motivation. Your entire team has to be highly motivated to conduct a school book fair that will raise a lot of funds for the school. So, the first thing to do is to evaluate your school support system. Starting from teachers, volunteers, students and parents. Everyone should visualize the positive results of putting on a book fair. One way to increase their enthusiasm is to reward them. Put this at the end of the checklist, but don’t forget to mention it first when you call for a book fair meeting at school. So, let’s start with the five important things that are needed to put together a fun and successful book fair.

1. Choose a Provider: Prepare a book inventory according to category and age group and place orders for books. The best way is to opt for a scholastic sales consultants who will take care of providing books for different age groups.

2. Choose the date and duration: Decide on a suitable date for the book fair. Remember to avoid test schedules and important school events and also choose days near payday. One important point to note here is that the scholastic society offers benefits during certain months of the year (please check online).

Determine how long the book fair will be held. If the PTA agrees, there can be events for grandparents, children and even food can be served (Organizing for food needs separate planning by itself).

3. Gather your Team: We can’t possibly get the fair running with only school admins and teachers. We need to call for volunteers who will be given individual tasks (which need to be tracked) and reporting hierarchy also needs to be decided. Parents, grandparents, senior students, family and friends can be of great help here.

Put up signs near the library or school entrance, inform the school principal about your search and also pass out information during the school PTA meetings. Alternatively, you can ask volunteers to register through online planning tools. People who are selected as volunteers should be able to spare a lot of time before and after right after the event. Choose people who are enthusiastic, trustworthy, patient (they will need to handle a lot of children during the fair) and emphasize the need to stay focused and organized during the event.

4. Schedule Your Workload: Chart out the tasks, allowing enough lead time for each activity. Remember to make time for decorations (hall or garden or library – depending on venue) and preparing signs, board and book racks. Create a PR group that will spread word about the school event within and outside of the school. Check with the provider whether he will be bringing his team for overseeing sales or you may need to plan for that also. Make sure to organize for snacks, beverages and other goodies to keep your team going.

Prepare a register with names of volunteers, their tasks, reporting time and exit time. Also, allocate separate trustworthy persons to handle the cash register (you can take the help of school teachers for this). One good idea is to prepare an instruction booklet for volunteers. To handle traffic arrangements and unruly crowd we definitely need traffic controllers, so, inform them in advance.

5. Plan Ahead and Stay Motivated: Plan early, at least a month in advance, so there will be enough time to get the volunteer team together and assign tasks according to their interests. Also, there will be enough time to rethink ideas on titles, banners, etc. School events can also be organized via planning tools that are available on the internet.