In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t ultimately person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers near the start of college if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for the entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, however, you plan 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 much time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but needless to say you’ll be higher off when you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you count on. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to enable at the least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you should you should definitely develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar venture – you possibly can and will start advertising and marketing through the planning and production stages of the challenge. However, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you’ve the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit a minimum of a couple of extra weeks, maybe extra, on your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the meant viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing undertaking begins whenever you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can 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’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability permit just a little extra time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
