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 isn’t ultimately consumer’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s palms near the beginning of faculty if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must be sure to enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they will need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you selling at a local festival or different event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however understand that you may be better off in case you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you expect. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to allow a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to be sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you can and will start advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at least a number of extra weeks, perhaps more, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the meant audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture begins when you hand off the entire pictures, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must probably permit just a little extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
