In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality 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 will not be ultimately user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s palms near the start of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may need and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales depends upon your sales strategy. Are you selling at an area festival or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however understand that you may be better off in the event you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must enable at least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it is best to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar mission – you may and should begin marketing during the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. However, in case you wait to begin advertising till you will have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit no less than a number of extra weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge starts whenever you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed 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 (generally sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability permit a bit extra time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
