In planning any calendar printing undertaking, 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, if your calendar is not in the long run consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s arms close to the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to be sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area competition or other occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, however needless to say you will be better off in case you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you count on. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it is best to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general length of the calendar venture – you may and should begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the venture. Nonetheless, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you may have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit a minimum of just a few extra weeks, maybe extra, for your marketing message to achieve the meant audience and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing mission starts once you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely allow a bit of further time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
