In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be in the end person’s palms earlier than 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 must be within the consumer’s arms close to the beginning of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a very good timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may 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 enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you want for sales is dependent upon your sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or different event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember that you’ll be better off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event will not be what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it’s best to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar project – you may and may start advertising through the planning and manufacturing phases of the venture. However, for those who wait to start advertising and marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow not less than a number of extra weeks, possibly extra, in your marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and motivate them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing mission starts once you hand off all the images, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to most likely allow slightly extra time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
