In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s hands close to the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a very good timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they may want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both 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 sales strategy. Are you selling at a local festival or other event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but take into account that you’ll be higher off for those who can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event aren’t what you count on. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must permit at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it is best to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar undertaking – you may and may begin marketing throughout the planning and production levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, when you wait to start advertising and marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow a minimum of just a few additional weeks, possibly more, in your advertising message to reach the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing venture starts if you hand off all of the images, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should probably permit a bit of additional time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
