In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious reality to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s arms close to the start of school if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will 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 difficult. How a lot time you need for sales depends on your sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you’ll be higher off if you happen to can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you count on. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it’s best to be sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you can and may start advertising through the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start out marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit a minimum of a few extra weeks, possibly extra, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture starts whenever you hand off all the photos, text, logos, promoting, and so on. 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 finished product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to probably permit just a little additional time – possibly a month in total – for production.
