In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the end person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s arms close to the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s arms? 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 will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, 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 difficult. How a lot time you need for sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or different occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you may be better off for those who can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you must allow no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and will start marketing through the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. Nonetheless, for those who wait to begin advertising and marketing till you could have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the very least a couple of extra weeks, perhaps extra, on your marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing project begins when you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must most likely allow a bit of further time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
