How Harry Potter can help with funding your World Book Day celebrations

Next weekend I’m helping M’s school run a Harry Potter event, in the run up to Harry Potter Book Night.

In order to raise funds for the school’s book festival later in the year the Parents Association is running a pop-up Honeydukes shop at the event, where applicants to Hogwarts and their families will be able to buy treats.

We’ve kept things super simple – snacks which can be prepared easily and in large quantities and we’ve costed what we hope to raise. I thought I’d share this with you so you too could run a pop-up Honeydukes sweet shop tying in with Harry Potter Book Night. Perhaps you could use the funds you raise to put towards World Book Day celebrations. We’re hoping to make £150, enough to go about a third of the way to paying for an author visit later in the year.

What are we selling and how will we make the profit we predict?

We’re hoping for an audience of 400, with 250 drinks purchases and 120 snack purchases. Because of the large number of people, we’ve bagged up in advance a selection of Honeyduke’s finest wizarding treats, so that each bag contains 1 liquorice wand, 25g of Bertie Botts every flavour beans (that’s about 10 beans), 4 Sherbet lemons (Dumbledore’s favourite), five jellied slugs and an acid pop (click to go to the sweet wholesalers we’ve used and the products we’re substituting for each item).

Cost price per bag comes in at 42p per bag but we will be selling them at £1 a go. I’m pretty confident all our bags will go, so we should make almost £70 from sweet sales. If there is a sweets wholesaler near you, I’d suggest you contact them as their prices might be cheaper than those you’ll find on the web. When I explained to our local wholesaler the nature of the event, I was able to get a cash and carry “day pass” so I wasn’t required to meet their standard minimum spend.

If you’d like to use the label I created to stick on the goody bags, you can download it from here.

In addition to Honeydukes sweet treats we’ll be selling Muggle Tea and Coffee, Polyjuice potion (longlife chocolate milk – polyjuice potion is described as being muddy brown before the final ingredient is added), Gillywater (squash), and – of course – Butterbeer. All drinks will be 50p (for ease of money handling).

There are hundreds of Butterbeer recipes on the web, but we’ve settled on this:

1 capful of caramel syrup – the type used to make flavoured coffee. We found ours on office in Starbucks, but you can easily buy online

250ml of cream soda

A squirt of squirty cream

This butterbeer doesn’t have quite the colour or taste of the Butterbeer you can buy at the Harry Potter Studios, but having taste tested it with a number of Harry-Potter-mad children, it’s good enough. It also is easy to make in large quantities, and has a bit of theatricality about it, which is no bad thing. Each Butterbeer will cost about 15p to make.

I’ve downloaded this free Harry Potter font and have created plenty of signs to dress the shop. You can download them here.