In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s arms close to the start of faculty if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for your entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to make 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 neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you want for sales relies on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or other occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you’ll be higher off in the event you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it is best to make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and may begin advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the mission. Nevertheless, if you wait to start advertising until you might have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the very least a number of extra weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising message to succeed in the meant viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture starts whenever you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to 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 if in case you have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to probably allow a little additional time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
