In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s palms near the start of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for your entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they will need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but take into account that you may be higher off when you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion will not be what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to enable at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar project – you’ll be able to and will start marketing during the planning and production levels of the mission. Nevertheless, in case you wait to start marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the least a few extra weeks, maybe extra, in your marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project begins whenever you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner if you have a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability enable a bit of extra time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.
