In planning any calendar printing venture, the 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, if your calendar just isn’t in the long run consumer’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s palms close to the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine 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 just must be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they are going to want and factor 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 little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however keep in mind that you will be higher off in the event you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should enable a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you should be sure you develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar project – you may and will start advertising through the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. However, in case you wait to start advertising and marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow no less than just a few further weeks, maybe more, in your advertising message to succeed in the intended audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins when you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability enable a bit of extra time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.
