Several years ago, my chapter decided that it would be fun to create a cookbook from our member’s recipes to sell as a fundraiser.  After some research, we decided to use Morris Press Cookbooks (www.morriscookbooks.com) because of their user friendliness and competitive prices.

Cover

Once we had ordered a cookbook kit from Morris Press (free!), we were able to set up a password protected area for our members so they could easily add their recipes from their home computer.  For each recipe you could choose a category, title, ingredients and instructions, and, finally, who contributed the recipe.  We encouraged members to not only use their own recipes, but to ask family members for their favorite recipes as well.  We ended up compiling over 125 pages of delicious recipes!  The recipes are automatically sorted into a categorized index of recipes as well as being indexed by contributor.

Recipe[1]

We were also able to create our own cover page and category title pages using pictures of ladies from our club!  It was decided that we would go with a 50’s housewife theme with silly phrases.  We scheduled an activity to shoot the pictures together at a member’s house and of course we all glammed up, red lipstick, pin curls, and ruffled aprons galore!

We also included a section all about MOMS Club® at the beginning of our cookbook.  The history of how MOMS Club was started by Mary James, our goals and mission statement, as well as a ‘MOMS Club means to me…’ section.  This cookbook was fun to make and was a great fundraiser to finance our service project for the year.  We made this cookbook 4 years ago and I pull it out to find recipes almost weekly!

Tips

  • Make sure to set deadlines and really talk this up to your members.  As mommies lots of times we totally intend to do something, but then we’ll get busy with life and forget.
  • Some members may not be computer savvy, make sure to work with them so their recipes are included.
  • This is a great project for a committee to head up!
  • Our chapter took pre-orders to get an idea of how many cookbooks we would need.  We ordered extra (way to many in fact!) to sell throughout the year.
  • Discuss pricing so that you make enough money to pay for the cookbooks and earn a profit, but you aren’t charging an outrageous price.

Submitted by the MOMS Club of Rio Rancho-N, NM.

Note:

This is a fabulous idea for a MOMS Club project!  One of our first service projects ever was actually a cookbook! 

We used another company, but like this chapter, we sold pre-orders.  With the pre-orders, we actually had the cost covered 100% before we signed the contract!  That way we could go into the whole process without any worries about how to cover the costs.

The project was a lot of fun and I still use the cookbook!

Mary James
Founder & Chairman
International MOMS Club