September is pediatric cancer awareness month. Pediatric cancer kills more children than any other disease. This past July, the kids and I spent some time in the kitchen baking up dozens and dozens of cookies to put together a bake sale to benefit Cookies for Kids Cancer. It’s a cause we decided we wanted to get behind for many reasons and planning, baking and selling allowed us to enjoy some fun time together in the process. We ended up earning $155 which we thought was pretty good for our first try!

Thinking about planning a bake sale of your own? We made some notes for next time to help make our next sale an even bigger success. And, from now through the end of December, if you register your bake sale with Cookies for Kids Cancer, Glad to Give will MATCH your earnings (up to $200,000) to help fund pediatric cancer research!

Here are our top tips!

Choose Your Location. We set up at during swim team practices and the next day in front of our neighborhood’s main pool. Next time we’ll choose a spot with more foot traffic as a lot of people were driving by but didn’t always stop.

Simplify Your Options. No need to complicate things with a ton of options–that just means more work for you! We chose to have four varieties of baked goods. Brownies were our top seller, followed by sugar cookies, then lemon bars and finally chocolate chip cookies. You could also check with local bakeries to see if they would donate items to your sale. Each bag of two items sold for one dollar. You could also not price your items and just suggest donations. We tried this but it didn’t go over that well so added the pricing.

Display and Signage Are Key. Clearly state what you are doing—having a bake sale–and who you are benefiting. It should be clear enough to read from a distance. Nearly everyone asked us what our cause was because they could not tell from our too small signs. Next time we will also have a larger table and dress it up a bit to hopefully attract more customers.

Work Your Networks. Recruiting friends to help out with baking ahead of time or on sale day makes adds to the fun and less stress. I also sent out email and Facebook announcements to let friends know about our sale so they could plan a stop by our booth and tell their friends too. Next time I will contact some other related charities to help get the word out. I hope to also plan a sale with one of my kids’ scout troops as a service project.

Little Extras. Free samples are always nice so we cut up some of the cookies for just that. We also offered lemonade and fruit punch for sale, both very popular additions which meant more income. Next time, my daughter suggested we bring music to help attract customers and set a festive mood. I suggest having extras for your volunteers to sample or other snacks so that you’re not eating your sellable items—it’s hard to resist all those delicious treats!

Don’t Forget the (small) Essentials. For our change box, we wished we had more five dollar bills. Since we were outside in the Texas heat, we also found it helpful to have bug spray (to keep the mosquitoes off of us!), extra drinking water, our cooling water fans and hand gel. We also kept our extra supply of packaged cookies and beverages cool in iced down coolers. If your kids are helping you, they should bring an activity to do or book to read for those lulls in business.

I hope you’re inspired to plan a bake sale of your own…whatever the cause. You’ll no doubt feel good after you do for all the good you can do!