In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is just not in the end user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s fingers close to the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for your entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you need for gross sales depends upon your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you may be higher off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to allow at the least two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar project – you can and should start marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. Nevertheless, if you wait to start advertising until you have the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit a minimum of just a few extra weeks, maybe extra, for your advertising message to reach the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture begins while you hand off all of the photos, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely allow a little bit additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
