Just before reading week, we had our third and final bake sale for Leaping Lion Books. I thought I would capture some of the highlights from the bake sale, not just to reminisce, but so that hopefully next year’s students or anyone else fundraising for a cause can grab something from our experience.
As I mentioned in my previous post about our other two bake sales, we wanted to make this third one more of an opportunity to promote the book. We brought back some of the black and white bookmarks we had from the last bake sale, and some new coloured ones that had the cover of the book on them with different quotes from Stan Rogal’s stories. We also included our website, blog and twitter on the bookmarks so that people can follow us for more details on the book. This was a nice incentive for us to give our supporters because it gave them more information on who we are and what we are trying to raise money for.
We also decided to bring in something fun to get students involved. It was a Valentine’s Day themed bake sale and Rogal’s stories all revolve around the complexity of relationships. We decided to bring in a “Love Advice” board that people could fill because the characters in Rogal’s Obsessions could really use some love advice! This was also something we thought would be a nice way to interact with students via Twitter. We asked students to take a picture of their advice and post it on Twitter using #LLLoveAdvice (the two L’s standing for “Leaping Lion”). Although we did not get any Twitter posts, it was still nice to have people fill up our board with some very interesting advice and silliness. It made for a fun bake sale!
My advice for students who are or will be planning a bake sale is to use the bake sale as an opportunity to promote your cause. Students are very curious as to what you are doing or what opportunities may be available to them at York University, so having extra incentives and games that will give them more information in a fun way will encourage them to support you. And, of course, you have to have amazing looking bakes and sweets. We were all joking that if this whole publishing career doesn’t work out for us, we could always open up a bakery! Haha, or do both?
Thank you so much to all who came out to support us in publishing Stan Rogal’s Obsessions. Printing day is only two days away! It’s so exciting to see all our hard work finally come to fruition. We are equally excited to share the actual, physical book with you and would like to invite you all to attend our book launch on Thursday, March 13th at 7:00 p.m. Check out our Facebook page for details! Hope to see you there!
Parisima Baha, Marketing Manager
Leaping Lion Books 