In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact to pay attention 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 isn’t in the end person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s palms near the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for the complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must ensure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may want and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or other event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but understand that you will be better off for those who can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to enable at the very least two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to be sure you develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you can and will begin advertising and marketing during the planning and production stages of the challenge. However, for those who wait to begin advertising till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow not less than just a few additional weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing undertaking starts when you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts 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 normally about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a selected deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability enable slightly further time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
