Small & Mighty Organizations

Hi All - I've come to my "Genius Bar" of all things rescue and shelter related, with a fundraising question. We have a very talented member of our breed organization who has offered to help us, by making some  Maltese  products to sell. She does some beautiful pen and ink drawings of Maltese and she's mentioned making blank greeting cards. But her designs could go on other items. Coming here to find out if anyone has fundraised with cards, how you estimate how many to make? What other products or events that have been worthwhile for you? Are things like t-shirts, hats, tote bags worth it?  We don't want to put time and effort into things that don't help bring in much needed funds. We carry a beautiful sterling silver jewelry line but the sales have flat lined after offering the items for years. And we spent all that money stocking the items in our online store.  We're a small national foster based organization dedicated to rescuing Maltese and Maltese mixes.  Thanks so much for all you all do.

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Susan Leavitt
National Coordinator, East Coast, President of the Board
American Maltese Association Rescue
New York NY
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We have a couple artists that donate to our rescue, but sounds like you've got a different opportunity. One of our artists does watercolor and zendoodle greeting cards, but each is it's own artwork, so not a case of us using one design and making a set of identical cards. The other artist does custom pet watercolor paintings. For both, we sell them in our auctions. There is an Artists For Animals Auction on Facebook that will happen in November. Just search for them if you're interested in getting involved in that.Anyone can contribute and designate the animal rescue or shelter that will get the proceeds.  For Pen and Ink drawings like you're talking about, that could easily go on a tshirt in a Bonfire store. We've had good luck selling shirts there, and they can either be shipped right to the buyer, or you could have some mass produced to sell at events. They also do tote bags. 

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Cheryl Anderson
Vice President
https://www.laketraverseanimalrezcue.com
SD
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We also have an artist who does card designs for us. She did a line of Christmas postcards and I think we printed 200 each of 2 designs for selling at Christmas markets.  At that time we didn't do a lot of markets, thus the small run.  We did sell most of them and used some as giveaways, eg if someone dropped money in the collecting tin, we gave a postcard. They were popular and I'm thinking of reprinting this year as proper cards vs postcards. [adds  that to my to do list...!] They're a fairly cheap item to produce and they don't really date.

The last 2 years we did wall calendars, they were super cheap to produce and we sold out both years. They're also used as thank you gifts for local partners and high level donors. Properly designed and very photo heavy. We chose wall calendars because other local dog rescues use small desk calendars and we wanted to have a different offering. 

We're also developing ideas for other items (context - we're in Portugal so our market is a little different). We are working on using local artists and manufacturers where we can, so at present this is the list:

- Key rings in crochet with a cat shape 
- Key rings or magnets in wood with our logo cat shape
- Bags screen printed locally, small run, with design by a local artist
- Cups made locally (this is an area known for its ceramics) - higher end item as these aren't a mass produced mug. The design will be by local ceramic artist(s).

I am not sure how all these will go, we'll see!

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Bettina Vine
Animal Health Director
The Kitten Connection
Peniche, Portugal
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