In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality 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 is just not ultimately user’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s palms close to the start of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out 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 clients or members; in that case you just must make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they may need and issue it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for gross sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or other event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be higher off should you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you anticipate. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to allow at least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you must be sure you develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you possibly can and will start marketing in the course of the planning and production levels of the challenge. Nevertheless, for those who wait to start advertising till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow a minimum of just a few extra weeks, possibly more, on your marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge starts while you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you speak 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 if in case you have a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability allow somewhat additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
