In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality 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 will not be ultimately consumer’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s arms close to the start of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, 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 complicated. How much time you want for gross sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area competition or other event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but take into account that you will be higher off if you happen to can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event usually 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’s best to enable at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to be sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you can and should begin advertising and marketing through the planning and production stages of the venture. Nonetheless, if you wait to begin advertising till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit no less than a few extra weeks, possibly more, to your marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins when you hand off the entire photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner you probably have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably permit a little bit extra time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
