How to Make a Calendar for Your Animal Rescue Organization

Animal rescue organizations are always looking for fundraisers. At a fundraising meeting, a volunteer may suggest that your group puts out a calendar this year. After much debating about costs, design, and other issues, the idea is thrown out. Some groups think they are too small to have their own calendar. This article will show you why any group is large enough to have their own calendar. With the many possibilities available for calendar ideas, selling calendars is a great fundraiser for any organization.

But It's Too Expensive!

This almost always seems to be the first objection to putting out a calendar. Having calendars printed costs money and animal rescues tend to have very little money to spare. Even if your group was guaranteed that all of the calendars would sell, you still might not have money to put out initially. Especially because the calendar project is one that should usually be started at least a couple months prior to when you expect to start selling the calendars. Having calendars professionally printed may be expensive, but there are other options out there. If you need an option with no upfront costs, try CafePress. At CafePress, your organization will not be putting out any money. However, if a calendar sells, it will be printed and then your group will receive a specified amount for that calendar sale (you will set that amount). Large or small groups can use CafePress to make their calendars this way. The downside of this method is, you'll have to have people order your calendar online. While you can order calendars from CafePress already printed at a discount, if you're going to have calendars printed, you might as well go with a cheaper option. Don't think only of professional printers with business locations near you. Think online printers as well. Several offer fantastic services and may even give your nonprofit organization a discount. If neither of these options will work for your group, see if any volunteers in your organization own photo printers. Some groups put out nice calendars that they print and bind themselves. If you have a volunteer with the time and resources, go for it. However, I would caution you that it is a very time consuming project when done this way and that ink is very expensive. If you're having a volunteer print all of the calendars, I would highly recommend reimbursing them for the ink and paper if you'd like them to continue volunteering for this project year after year.

So Many Ideas to Choose From

Now that it's been established that cost doesn't have to be an issue, let's wade through some of the possibilities of what to actually put on the calendar. This is where the volunteers will all have ideas and many of them will conflict. You may find it acceptable to put out more than one calendar or you might want to compromise instead. It's a good idea to have a meeting so that you can see what the majority of people want in the calendar. For smaller groups especially, sales to volunteers and their family members are important. You're not likely to sell many calendars to volunteers if they don't like the design and layout of the calendar. If your primary target group is the public however, it might be a good idea to test the possible ideas out on a few people who don't volunteer for your organization. You can even use a message board to ask people what they think of certain ideas. Incase you don't know where to start, below I've listed just a few of many possible ideas for making calendars.

Themed Calendars

Themed calendars are fun. A lot of volunteers generally want to do a themed calendar. For a more traditional theme, you could do something like a holiday theme: a photo of two animals kissing for February (Valentine's Day), an animal with bunny ears on for April (Easter), and a pet in a Santa hat for December (Christmas). Be careful though with some themes. For example, if you're using religious symbols in your calendar, you may not get many sales from those outside of that religion. For some people, even Easter bunnies and Santa hats are offensive. Aside from doing themes based on holidays, you can also do a seasonal theme such as: snowy photos for winter months, photos taken in the fall leaves for autumn, flowers in the background on photos for spring months, and lazy scenes for summer. Seasonal themes tend to be quite popular if you look at professionally done calendars sold in stores. There are many other options for themes. A couple more ideas are: smiling pets, action shots, and baby animals. Making a themed calendar can be a lot of fun, but make sure to plan things out in advance. If you need a photo of a pet in the fall leaves for example, you don't want to miss your chance to take that photo.

A Bunch of Cute Photos

If you thought of making a calendar just a little too late to do something themed, you might still be able to pull off a great calendar. Odds are, throughout the year your volunteers have taken several great photos of the animals that have been saved. Several professional calendars on the market are basically just a collection of nice photos. These photos are simply assigned to any month you choose, and you've got a calendar.

Artistic Calendars

Perhaps you have a couple of artistic volunteers in your group. If so, there are several other ideas for calendars. You don't necessarily need to have a volunteer photographer if you have some artistic volunteers. Instead of doing a regular photo calendar, you could have a hand drawn calendar, a painted calendar, or another type of beautiful artsy calendar. If you have a lot of junior volunteers, you could even do a calendar of kid art. You'd be surprised, a lot of people really like calendars that aren't just your standard great photos.

Calendars for Volunteers: Before/After Photos and Event Photos

Sometimes you realize that most likely, only the volunteers are going to be purchasing calendars. If that is the case with your organization, feel free to design a calendar that would be appreciated by the volunteers. The volunteers have worked hard all year to rescue animals. Some animals may have come into your organization with matted fur, broken bones, and several problems. Now these same animals are doing great in foster care or may have even been adopted already. A calendar of before and after photos can boost volunteer morale throughout the year as the volunteers look back on all the hard work they did and see how much it helped those animals. If your organization doesn't have a lot of good before and after photos, you might want to try inspiring the volunteers by making a calendar of event photos. Show volunteers proudly helping your organization at events. As the volunteers look at their calendar each day, they will be reminded of all the good times they've had so far. Sometimes the public will want to buy these calendars as well, but these ideas tend to be more for the volunteers.

A Few Additional Tips

Before you get started, there are a few common mistakes that I'd like to share. If you're calling on the volunteers to take photos for the calendar, make sure that you check into pixel requirements for your printing method before you set the volunteers to their tasks. Generally, you can make a decent calendar with a 3 megapixel camera (although, 5 megapixels would be better). You don't want to have a volunteer take a bunch of great photos in the one megapixel setting, only to find out later that the photos won't fill out the pages nicely. You'll also want to make sure that volunteers realize that they may or may not get their photos in the calendar. Sometimes a volunteer will think that their photo is great, but if you have to sell this calendar, it needs to really be great. If you don't want to end up looking like the bad guy while tossing out some photos and leaving others in, ask a couple of volunteers to act as a panel of judges. My last tip is that you use your first year as a test run if you are having calendars printed. Don't have 2,000 calendars printed only to find out that the idea is a complete flop. You might even want to only start out with 20 calendars the first year if your group is small. Of course, if you're using CafePress or a similar method, you're not going to have that problem. If you are actually having the calendars printed before people order them though, you should definitely make sure not to blow all your money on one idea.

So that's all there is to it. You just need to decide how you want to produce your calendar, how much you can afford to spend on this project (if anything), and how you want to design it. A group of any size can take on the calendar fundraiser. It is fun to have a calendar to call your own and can bring in some revenue as well. The most important thing to remember throughout the project, is to have fun!