I know how you feel about learning a few lessons. We just had our first all you can eat Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser which I was coordinating and we had a few glitches but overall it went very well.
We created tickets too but it was $7/individual $20/family(2adults+children under 18). We sold around 90 tickets 50/40 indiv/family and had about 130 people attend the event. The ticket sales generated about $1500 including about $250 in direct donations. It also helped we were able to print a buy one get one free mini-golf game coupon on the back from a local miniature golf course.
We had a dinner with Spaghetti, meat sauce, meatless sauce, salad, garlic bread, drink and simple desserts like brownies and rice crispie treats. The meat, bread and simple desserts were all donated. The cost of the rest of the food was around $150. After the dinner we had a live dessert auction with 14 donated desserts. That generated another $450.
We decked out the tables with linens and real napkins donated by a person who works for a linen outfit. We also used real plates and silverware and had a dishwashing crew to help reduce costs. We decked the hall with printed 8x11 pictures of the scouts and their outings. Thier ribbons, and numerous plaques showing off numerous years of patches, and pictures of events, parades, etc.... The place which was also donated by a local church including tables and chairs, really looked great.
We did a tremendous amount of preparation of the food earlier that day which is a must. So all we really had to do was warm the bread and cook the noodles. The toughest issue we had was the noodles. We did things buffet line style with a serving cart warmers and we only had two pots for cooking noodles. Once we got behind on the noodles to the warmers we could not catch up with the line. So at least twice we had to tell the line of people we were out and it will be 10 minutes.
But other than that and a few scouts initially reluctant to sell tickets, everything went rather well IMO for our first time. We netted about $1800 for our troop which was well over our goal of $1100. We(the whole troop)also learned a lot from this first event and next year we should be able to make it a lot smoother and I might even get to eat dinner next time.
