In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar isn’t in the end consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s arms near the start of school if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for your complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must ensure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you may be better off in the event you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you must enable at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and will start marketing in the course of the planning and production stages of the venture. Nevertheless, for those who wait to start out marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow not less than a couple of additional weeks, maybe more, to your advertising message to succeed in the meant audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins if you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner you probably have a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to probably allow a little bit additional time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
