A great way to keep your organization’s name and purpose in front of your supporters all year round is by creating and selling fundraising calendars. Every page of a calendar holds the potential to bring awareness to your cause, provide fun photos of your group, or just present a gorgeous picture or fun graphic for your supporters to enjoy for a whole year.
But to create fundraising calendar possibilities for your organization, you need a plan. Let’s take a look at everything you need to consider to help you craft a winning calendar for your group, team, or organization.
Who Should Make Fundraising Calendars?
The great news is that any organization, group, or team can make fundraising calendars. Since there are a variety of ways to create a fun and useful calendar, just about any group can create a calendar to use to help raise money.
And groups that plan to make them will want to consider how their fundraising calendars will best support or reflect the mission or purpose of the group.
Getting Started with Fundraising Calendars
To begin your fundraising calendars, first determine what kind of calendar you want to produce. Fundraising calendars can be for general use that runs from January to December or they can be more specialized like ones that match up to specific dates like school-year calendars might.
Your organization might even want to do multi-year fundraising calendars if that suits your needs as well. Once the length and scope of your calendar are determined, decide if you want to include any special dates or notes on the fundraising calendars that pertain to your group like:
- scheduled matches, events, or practices
- national, local, or religious holidays
- school holidays or schedules
- important group, company, or school dates
- birthdays of group members
Should We Use a Template?
The short answer is yes! Of course, creating fundraising calendars from scratch is possible but using a free template saves time and effort. Put your time into creating a great-looking calendar, finding sponsors and advertisers, and selling a bunch of calendars for profit instead of spending time making a calendar format.
Fundraising Calendar Ideas
Coming up with a winning calendar that all of your fans will love to buy is key. Focus on creating a calendar with the biggest appeal for your fans, sponsors, and advertisers to get the biggest bang for your buck. Some great ideas to consider are:
- focus on pictures of one group or sub-group within the organization each month
- take pictures of group members in meaningful places like a school, practice area, workspace, or another recognizable location
- use baby pictures of group members
- ask members to submit fun, silly, or meaningful pictures from the last year
- pair photos of group members with their birthday month
- use past event photos as a reminder of regularly scheduled events for the calendar
- pictures that relate to your organization’s purpose or mission locations or beneficiaries
- local points of interest or parts of your area that are recognizable
- use member’s pet photos
- create pages dedicated to the fans or other groups that might be interested in buying the calendar
- choose a theme each month that corresponds to the season, your organization’s work, or another related theme
Details to Consider
Once you have started to put your calendar together, don’t forget about the details that make the calendar look professionally completed.
Front and Back Covers: The outside of the calendar should be eye-catching, have a great picture or grouping of pictures and clearly show fans what to expect inside. Using a heavier weight or coated cover like 120# for Wire-O and Coil bindings or 100# for Saddle Stitch will not only make the calendar more durable, but also adds a great look and feel to the calendar.
The back of the calendar is a great place to put advertising or sponsorship information as well. Consider making your organization’s logo prominently on the front or the back of your calendar as well as the years it serves for quick recognition.
Don’t be afraid to get professional design help with the cover art to ensure that your calendar will look great and sell well, providing great profits for your group.
Bindings: The binding describes how the calendar is held together and two main types of bindings are used for calendars: saddle stitching and circle ring bindings.
Saddle Stitch binding is perfect for calendars because it works well with a small number of pages and is lightweight.
Plastic Coil and Wire-O both bind with a hole punch and either plastic or wire coils that allow the calendar to lay flat or be opened to just one page at a time.
Hole Drilling: Pre-cutting a hole is helpful because it allows the calendar to be hung up without the customer having to poke a hanging hole.
Photos: Make sure all pictures are at least 300 dpi so they will print clearly.
Printing Fundraising Calendars
Once you have the calendar looking the way you want, it’s time to send it off to a trusted printing company like Dazzle Printing. Submitting your final draft for printing digitally makes self-publishing your fundraising calendar simple with our easy printing process and you will be ready to distribute and sell your calendar in no time.
Funding Fundraising Calendar
Creating a calendar can be a fun task, but the purpose of making fundraising calendars is to make money for your organization. There are three ways to raise money through a calendar: sponsorship, advertising, and selling the calendars themselves.
Sponsorships
The easiest way to get money upfront to fund the production of your fundraising calendars is to sell sponsorships for your group. Sponsorships can be handled in a few different ways, but the general purpose of a sponsor is for the company or individual sponsoring your group to have a highly visible place for their name, logo, or business information on your calendar. A few ways to set up sponsorships are:
- find one sponsor that simply covers the cost of printing the calendars
- seek out as many sponsors as possible and treat each sponsor the same
- look for a sponsor for each month or section of the calendar
- create a sponsored day, month, or part of the calendar to dedicate to each sponsorship
- create levels of sponsorship like gold to cover printing, silver to sponsor the back or front, bronze to sponsor a month
Potential places that your group can approach for sponsorships could be local businesses, medical offices that serve the group, restaurants the group members frequent, retail stores where supplies for the organization are purchased, local financial institutions that the group members use, fitness centers that members attend or friends and family of the group or fans of the organization.
Be sure to have a good idea of how many calendars you plan to print before discussing sponsorships with businesses.
Advertising
One of the lucrative ways to make extra funds on your fundraising calendars is to sell advertising space. Different from a sponsor, advertisers typically have one spot in the calendar where their business’s logo, ad, or picture is located.
It’s a good idea to create categories and sizes of ads to offer potential advertisers so that your calendar can be funded well by small as well as large businesses and individuals who want to support you.
Once you have an idea of the potential circulation of the fundraising calendars (how many you will sell) as well as pricing set up, members or families in the organization can start to sell ads to be featured in the calendar.
One of the great things about ads in calendars is the potential for customers to see a business’s advertisement for a whole year so consider selling ads that are on more than one page to entice businesses that would enjoy repeated exposure.
Selling the Calendar
Of course, the most obvious way to earn funds for your group from the calendar is to sell it. Encourage members to sell a set quota amount, set up a table at events or games or even send out emails announcing the sale to your boosters, fans, families and friends. Selling them as quickly as possible is the best way to make the money that your group needs.
Get Ready for the Funds to Roll In
Creating fundraising calendars is a great way to make something that members and fans will treasure for years to come while also bringing in needed funds for the group. Working with a trusted printing team like Dazzle Printing means that your group will have a fantastic experience while you raise the funds you need.
Dazzle Printing offers a wide variety of options for your fundraising calendars, including four different binding styles — perfect bound, plastic coil, saddle stitch, and wire-o. With different papers and sizes, you’re bound to be able to print your calendar exactly the way you want.
If you have time, be sure to request our free sample package, which has samples of all four binding styles. The plastic coil book contains all of our paper options, making it a great tool when deciding what options to use for your calendars.
