Posts Tagged ‘Calendars’
Guidelines On How To Make Fundraising Calendars
Making fundraising calendars is such a tedious task. From design to printing, you need to make sure that every component is being taken care of. You only want to produce the best for your fundraising calendars. If you wish to create fundraising calendars for distribution to your potential sponsors and donors, you want to give the best possible result. Big corporations and commercial companies need to be provided with high quality fundraising calendars. Otherwise, how can your cause or advocacy and at the same time, your group or organization be noticed? If you have not made fundraising calendars before, you may want to know the following guidelines.
Create a theme for your fundraising calendars.
For example, if you wish to promote the use of paper bags instead of plastic, you may want to create a catchy title, such as “Paper Over Plastic.” Have a creative vision for your fundraising calendars. Once you have made the over-all theme, go through the nitty-gritty side of making fundraising calendars.
Create a matrix for your fundraising calendars.
Identify what is the theme for each month or calendar page. Also, include the message, image, and other design elements that you wish to include. Make sure though that the whole calendar is tied together in a cohesive manner.
Let the graphic designer do the work.
Provide your creative inputs, but let the designer exercise his or her creativity in making fundraising calendars. Check the updates regarding the design. Make suggestions and recommendations. However, do not be a cause for setbacks if you want to make major design overhauls.
Work on the message.
Let your prospective donors get to know more about your company or the cause you are supporting through the calendar pages. Make sure that you have all it covered. Introduce your group and your cause, the vision and mission, your goals and objectives. Also, provide information on how other people can help.
Check the quality of the print.
Once the design template is finished, send the file to the printer. As you know, what you see on screen may not necessarily translate well on print. Thus, you have to know the actual print result. Find out if there are any changes you need to make on your design template.
Best Design Themes For Fundraising Calendars
One of the best and proven fundraising ideas for a lot of small projects is the printing of custom calendars for sale. These fundraising calendars can be an easy thing to develop and sell for anyone, even amateurs. In this special guide to fundraising calendars, I will tell you about the common design themes that can be applicable for your custom calendars. Use these ideas to start you off developing great color calendars that can give you well earned funds for your project.
a. The people theme – One of the most common but yet still very profitable design theme for fundraising calendars is the people theme. This kind of theme of course involves selling custom calendars with pictures of people in them. Those people can be beautiful and sexy models, celebrities, prominent community figures, national/local heroes, inventors, innovators etc. etc. As long as people can find inspiration, entertainment and even pleasure in seeing those certain kinds of people, you can apply them for your fundraising calendars. Believe me, these types of color calendars sell all the time, and you will probably print calendars like this at least once.
b. The animal theme – Now, another common theme that many people like is the animal theme. Almost everyone is an animal lover deep inside. That is why a collection of cute or wonderful images of certain animals is a great concept for custom calendars for fundraising. You can use cute cats and dogs as a good base for your design of course. Sometimes, you can also go a bit different and go for a collection of exotic or rare animals. Environmentalists of course will love it if you feature endangered specials and other important “poster animals” that represents the situation of mother earth today. So if you can access images of animals for your color calendars, an animal theme for your calendars can be a great idea for your fundraising efforts.
c. The nature theme – Beyond animals, people can also be equally attracted to buying color calendars with a nature theme. By collecting impressive images of natural panoramas and exquisite vistas, you can have a good and relaxing color calendar primed for selling. The best images from nature typically involves the sky (sunrise or sunset) as well as images of plants/tress and unusual rock formations. As long as the images are impressive, with great lighting and a phenomenal subject, your natural theme images for custom calendars can still sell good and help you with your fundraising.
Some Practical Tips for your Fundraising Calendars
It is always i’mportant to be practical in the execution of your fundraising ideas. Even if you are just using simple fundraising calendars to get that extra money, you still need to be deliberately practical with all the development steps to make sure that you do not spend too much in the investment.
In this special guide to fundraising calendars, I will teach you some practical tips in developing those custom calendars. With these tips, you should be able to optimize your resources for your calendar printing and design, helping you be practical as well as maximizing the returns of your fundraising efforts.
* Identify easy consumer markets – Being practical with your fundraising means going for those easy consumer markets first. You don’t want to target customers that are picky or hard to impress right at the outset of your campaign. It is best to go for those easy and responsive ones so that you can get that good consumer base for fundraising.
So at the start of your brainstorming for calendar designs, try first to research and identify who exactly your easy consumer markets are. Who are the people that you can easily market your fundraising calendars to? What kind of things might they like? What kind of calendars will get the most ideal response from them? If you can identify a responsive target market and design your custom calendars for them, you will get faster and better returns for your efforts. It is only practical to go for the easy ones first to save on time.
* Do the designs on your own – Now, to practically reduce your calendar design costs to zero, you should try to do the designs on your own. Trust me, with today’s technology even novices can pull of great looking color calendars. All you have to do is to pick the right design software and use calendar templates and guides. You should be able to follow most tutorials and templates with little trouble, eventually helping you to create a great custom calendar on your own. With you doing all the designs, you can save money on the photographer as well as the layout artist for your calendars, that is easily a hundred or so dollars saved for your cause.
Using Fundraising Calendars in a Small Business
When you have a small business, you are probably always searching for great fundraising ideas to get you started, especially when you need extra resources to help you out. One of the best things that you can do in this situation is to print fundraising calendars. That is right! Custom calendars can be made for your small business to help you out and get extra funds. Let me explain to you how fundraising calendars can work for your own small business to get you more money and more exposure.
* The basic premise of printing fundraising calendars – Printing fundraising calendars for your small business is basically the cheapest and easiest way to get extra resources. With just an initial investment of a few hundred dollars you can earn three to four times that, if you can create a really appealing color calendar. This can happen because the original cost of calendar printing is really cheap. Beyond that, developing color calendar designs can be done almost all for free, because you can easily get free design resources and templates for calendar printing.
So it is really quite easy for you to do all the work cost effectively for your fundraising campaign. Those custom calendars can help you get the profits that you need for your small business. As you can see, business calendar printing is low risk, high yielding with little initial investment really needed.
* Additional benefits of custom calendar printing – Beyond simply getting you money though, one good thing about fundraising calendars that can benefit your small business is that it can also be a great marketing or advertising tool for you. By simply slipping some advertising messages and marketing images into your custom calendars, you can use it as a platform to attract people to do business with you. So besides selling people something useful, you are also basically doing some marketing to them, uplifting your business image in the first place. This is a great additional bonus to selling fundraising calendars, which can really contribute well to the future of your business.
Making Fundraising Calendars from Home
Fundraising calendars can easily be made at home. It has long been one of the best fundraising ideas for anyone to print fundraising calendars for small projects or even home businesses. The great thing about fundraising calendars is that you can actually make them at home if you really want to. Let me teach you how you can make your own custom calendars right in the comfort of your own home. Here are the different steps that you need to know.
1. Choose your software – The first step in making fundraising calendars from home is to choose your own publishing software. Today, all calendar layouts typically start from a digital layout. So you will need to choose your most preferred software to design your own fundraising calendar. While it is easy to create calendars from something as simple as a word processor (i.e. Microsoft Word), it is best that you choose something a little bit more powerful in publishing such as Adobe In Design or Microsoft Publisher. Any software made specifically for publishing specialized prints should be perfect as your choice for software. Make sure that you can easily learn and use the application that you choose.
2. Get your template – The second step is to get your template. This involves basically acquiring a calendar template that will become your design foundation. First look for calendar templates in your software, in a lot of cases, applications do have some stock calendar templates that you can use for your design. However, you can also download different kinds of calendar templates with different configurations by just searching for them using the Internet. Just try to look for and choose the design that you really want from all these sources.
3. Get your pictures – Now, before you get down and dirty with the layout, I suggest that you first get your pictures. In most cases, people like to put in their own custom pictures per month in fundraising calendars. This typically is the selling factor, so it is best to do this initially and take the photos before the layouts begin. So depending on the concept of your color calendars, try to get the images that you need for your project. Just make sure that you get the largest image that you can with the highest resolution possible. This will make the pictures look more ideal.