Here are some of the red poinsettias we are shipping from this week and are on deck to ship out next week.

I had a few minutes and thought that I would upload a couple of photos for you. I hope I have time to add parts 2 through as many as I can.

These are just about ready and will be gone by the end of next week. Don’t worry we have plenty more for the later weeks.

It’s difficult to get good poinsettia pictures. The sunlight always makes the red look washed out.

September 17, 2013 – Here is a display of mums and some of the mums in the field that we will be shipping out to this week’s scheduled fundraisers.

A plant fundraiser can be somewhat challenging or intimidating if you have not done one before. Here are 3 tips for a successful plant fundraiser.

1. Set a sales goal for your fundraiser – you don’t want to get stuck with plants leftover that you can’t sell or need more plants than have because your sellers sold more than you ordered. The best way to determine how many plants (mums or poinsettias) you can sell is to get together with your seller and decide on a reasonable number that each seller can sell then multiply that number by the total number of seller you have.

For example, you set individual sell’s goal of 10 pots and you have 30 sellers so your default sales goal would be 300 pots (10 x 30 = 300).

This total number then becomes your group sales goal.

2. Pre-book and pre-sell your fundraiser – pre-book your plant order based on your groups sales goals to ensure that you have enough plants to fill the orders that you take. Next pre-sell based on individual seller goals. This way you know what you have on order, your selling group knows how many it has to sell and each seller knows how much they need to contribute in sales orders to reach that goal.

3. Communication – your sellers need to be in continuous communication with your fundraising coordinator. They should be letting the coordinator know on a weekly or daily basis how much of their individual sales goal they have met. The coordinator also needs to be communicating to each seller how many total pot of plants are left to sell especially if some of your sellers have sold more than their set sales goal which lowers the individual seller sales goals as you continue to pre-sell.

Also the coordinator needs to be communicating with their supplier about how well their pre-selling is going and making any adjustments to their pre-booked order especially if they oversell and need more product. There may not always be any extra product available to pull from if a fundraiser does sell more than they originally planned.

Those are our 3 tips to a successful plant fundraiser. There is a little more to it than that but if you remember these tips you are well on your way to a successful fundraiser.

Bonus tip – calculate the break even point in your fundraiser based on your group sales goals. This number will tell you how many pots you have to sell to pay for your order. The break even point can be figured by total dollar amount divided by your selling cost per unit. For example if you ordered $1500 dollar in poinsettias and you are selling them for $10 each, you will need to sell 150 pots to break even. Once you sell more than 150 pots in this example, each pot you sell is profit. Sometimes it is good to show this as a visualization so that your sellers can see where they are at regarding your break even number and your total sales goal.

I wanted to let every see where we are at with our mums and poinsettias. The mums are doing very well due to the great summer weather we have had here in Arkansas. They are going to be a bit ahead of our usual schedule. Our usual schedule is that the early varieties run behind then they all bloom at once instead of blooming as the early, mid and late season varieties that they are supposed to be.

This year it appears that they are actually going to bloom as they are supposed to. The majority of our fundraisers are set to be pulled and shipped from our mid-season varieties. We are really looking forward to a great looking mum crop.

We just finished planting our first crop of poinsettias on Monday this week then went right into planting the second crop on Wednesday. We should have them all planted by next Tuesday. The really don’t look like much right after they have been planted. The hard part starts right after the planting.

Poinsettias have to be monitored each week to make sure that they are on schedule and if not, we make the necessary changes to the growing to get them back on track. Some people wonder about the cost of poinsettias but when you take into account that poinsettias take 15-17 weeks to grow there is a lot of time and care taken into growing these crops.

These poinsettias will look like…

…this in November.

Here are a couple of pictures of our poinsettias on the Miss Teen Oklahoma Christmas parade float. I hope we get some pictures of the float in the parade. If we do, I will be sure to add them here.

Here is a quick video of the poinsettias we will be shipping out tomorrow. The video quality shows the colors poorly but you can get a general idea of what they are looking like.

Here are some pictures of the poinsettias we are shipping today (November 19,2012). It is cloudy today which is great for taking poinsettia pictures. It is very hard to get good pictures of poinsettias. Sunny days make them appear pale and do not show their true colors.

The poinsettias pictured above were packed up when I went back out and the crew had moved on to the next house shown  below. Today is not even a big day but it is amazing how fast we can clean out a house when we start packing.

Here are what some of the poinsettias are looking like this week. More color is showing each day!

Here are a few pictures of our #6 Poinsettias for this year’s crop. This is only from one house. I will try to post more pictures from the other houses as well as from this house as month progresses and time allows.