In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the end user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s hands close to the start of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to make sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they may want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you want for sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or different occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be better off should you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you count on. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it is best to remember to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and may start marketing through the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow a minimum of a number of extra weeks, possibly more, for your advertising message to achieve the meant audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking begins whenever you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. 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. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability permit a little extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
