In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar isn’t ultimately person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms near the beginning of college if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How a lot time you need for gross sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or different occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you may be higher off when you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to allow not less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar challenge – you may and should start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the venture. Nonetheless, in case you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit no less than just a few extra weeks, possibly extra, to your marketing message to reach the intended audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge starts when you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should probably enable somewhat additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
