In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not ultimately person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s fingers near the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to be sure you permit 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’s going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you want for sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you will be higher off if you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you should allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you must remember to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you may and may begin advertising through the planning and production phases of the venture. Nonetheless, for those who wait to begin advertising and marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit not less than a few extra weeks, possibly extra, for your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture starts when you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a specific deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability enable a bit of extra time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
