In planning any calendar printing venture, 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, in case your calendar will not be in the long run user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s arms close to the beginning of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine 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 prospects or members; in that case you just need to ensure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they may want and issue it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you will be higher off if you happen to can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event will not be what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general period of the calendar project – you possibly can and may begin advertising during the planning and production levels of the challenge. Nevertheless, should you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at the very least just a few additional weeks, maybe extra, to your marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking begins when you hand off the entire photographs, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability enable somewhat extra time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
