Last night my 6 year old daughter decided she wanted to have a lemonade stand after dinner. My wife helped her make a pitcher of lemonade and they spent about 20 minutes making signs with markers.
They talked about how much they should charge for each cup of lemonade and, while my daughter thought maybe they could charge $1.50 per glass, my wife ended up recommending $1 and also suggested that they tell people that it was a suggested donation but they could pay what they wanted.
My daughter (and later her friend) sat out at the curb for about an hour and somehow managed to amass $14 from about 8 glasses of lemonade. The interesting phenomenon was that people always seemed to pay more when you just put a sign up that says “donation”.
This wasn’t a total surprise to me because of my experience with some fundraisers out at the lake. We have held a number of fundraisers out there to build a new playground for the kids. In the beginning we charged $2 for a hot dog and $1 for a soda. While we made a decent amount of money using that model, we later found that not putting a price on the items and simply putting a sign up that says, “Donation for new playground” yielded over double the total amount of money from the previous times that we set hard prices.
Anyway, it was fun to have my daughter out there making money for herself. She was very excited as customers (neighbors) showed up and as the money started to build up, she got even more excited. I thanked each of the neighbors that came by to buy some lemonade and joked that the money they paid for the lemonade was the final bit that we needed to make our house payment this month.