In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious fact to pay attention 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 will not be in the end person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may 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 close to the start of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for your complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must be sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they will want and factor it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but keep in mind that you will be higher off in case you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion aren’t what you count on. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to enable at least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it is best to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you may and will start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the project. However, if you wait to start out advertising till you will have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow not less than just a few additional weeks, possibly more, for your marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing venture begins once you hand off all the pictures, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability allow a little further time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
