In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s palms near the beginning of school if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will want and issue 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 bit more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local pageant or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be higher off when you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are not what you anticipate. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it is best to be sure to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you can and should begin advertising through the planning and production phases of the venture. Nevertheless, in case you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the very least a few further weeks, possibly more, to your marketing message to reach the supposed viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins while you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability enable a little bit additional time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
