In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be in the long run user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s hands close to the start of faculty if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they’ll 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 sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area festival or different event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be better off if you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to enable no less than two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you must make sure you develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you may and will begin advertising and marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. Nonetheless, in case you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the very least a couple of further weeks, possibly more, for your advertising message to achieve the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture starts while you hand off all the photographs, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a specific deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability enable a bit of further time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
