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A school calendar event is a really fun way to raise money for your school! The main idea behind this event is that the students get to enter their name into a drawing one time per calendar that they sell for the event.
Not only will your students be excited to see themselves and their work in print, but they’ll love the chance to win prizes every day over the course of the event month just for supporting their school! Use this reference as a guide to pulling together the best calendar fundraiser your school has ever seen! Don’t worry we also have lots of prize ideas to help inspire you!
Step One: Pick/Design a Calendar Template
Sit down with the PTO/PTA/your club and design a calendar template for the upcoming year. When designing your calendar, consider using pictures of student art work or snap shots of the students engaging in sports, academic contests or any other photos that shows how fun the school year has been so far.
Keep in mind: consider pricing for your calendars. We’ll discuss your fundraisers’ bottom line within the next few paragraphs but have an idea about how much you would like to charge for your calendars. We’ve seen between $25-$50 per calendar work pretty well for school fundraisers!
Step Two: Print the Calendars
If you choose to design the calendar yourself, make sure to shop around for a printing company. Keep in mind that the more calendars you order, the more of a discount the printing company will give you. We did some online quoting for printing prices and they vary from printer to printer, vastly in some cases.
When ordering 500 calendars to be printed, one company charged $24/calendar to print while the other one charged $4/calendar to print PLUS paid for the shipping and handling to get the calendars back to you. Keep an eye out for a good deal to maximize your profit and get your customers excited for your next calendar fundraiser.
Step Three: Print Out Calendar Order Slips
To get the order slips, print out a sample of the calendar (including a few pictures only) that will fit onto the top ¾ of a page while separating the bottom ¼ of the page with a perforated line. On that ¼ of the page, add a few spaces for the patron’s name, phone number, address, email address, and how many calendars they would like to buy. Make sure to indicate that the payment must be submitted with the filled out slip!
Additional helpful information to include on the top ¾ of your order slips is the price per calendar, how much money total in prizes will be given away over the course of the raffle month, the prize draw dates, and a few sample pictures of your calendar. Have these copies made and ready to go out to your students.
Step Four: Advertise the Fundraiser!
Let your students and their families know that the school will be selling calendars over the course of whichever month works best for your school/club. You’ll want to pick a month near the end of the year when it makes the most sense for your families to be thinking about switching from the old calendars to new ones.
Make sure to talk up the pictures that will be included in the calendar and most importantly, emphasize to your students that participation in the fundraiser will allow them to take part in a raffle!
Step Five: Pass Out Calendar Order Slips with Instructions For Fundraiser
Now’s the time to get the ball rolling for your event! Hand out a few order pages to each student and have them talk to their parents, families, and friends to sell as many calendars as possible. When a student makes a calendar sale, they should write the person’s information on the bottom quarter of the order form, tear the slip at the perforated line, and hand the ¾ sheet back to the person who placed the order. They should then collect the payment, and keep the ¼ sheet and payment together to turn in at the end of the fundraising period.
To review the rules of the fundraiser: Each student is to sell as many calendars as they can and get their name entered into a raffle one time per calendar that they sell. A name will be drawn every day of whichever month works best for your school (weekends included). Whoever wins the raffle of the day will win the prize for that day.
Bear in mind, each slip should be filled out with the person’s name and information that wants the calendar, not the student who made the sale. Feel free to include the students name on the slip but there needs to be a record of which calendar belongs to who.
Step Six: Collect Calendar Order Slips and Send Calendars Off to Be Printed
At the end of the sales period, collect all of the calendar slips and payments. Whoever is collecting them should keep a tally of how many calendars each student sold and thus how many times their name will be entered into the raffle. Also make sure that all of the submitted slips have their full payments attached to them! Those without payments won’t count towards the raffle.
Step Seven: Send Off Calendars to Be Printed and the Students’ Numbers For the Drawings
After you get all of the slips and payments collected and counted for the raffle, send out your calendars to be printed and your student names to be drawn! The best way to tackle this is to have a separate list of the students’ names and tally next to their names as you count how many calendars they sold.
Once you’ve confirmed all of the payments are there and tallied all of the sales, clip each student’s slips together and turn them into the PTO/PTA along with the names and the talley’s. As the calendars come in from the printer, they can put the slips back with the calendars and get them back to the student who sold them.
Step Eight: Draw Names!
Feel free to include thank you’s with the calendar’s when you deliver them to the patrons. I’m sure they’ll love to know that their contribution was appreciated and put to good use! If you’re looking for other similar events check out our creative raffle ideas!
