In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately consumer’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s fingers close to the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for your complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or different occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be better off for those who can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should enable a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you should you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you may and may start marketing through the planning and manufacturing phases of the mission. Nonetheless, when you wait to start marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at least a couple of further weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing project starts if you hand off the entire photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner you probably have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely allow a bit of extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
