In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the end person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers close to the start of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for the whole venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to ensure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at an area festival or different occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however remember that you may be better off should you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event should not what you count on. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to enable not less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to make sure you develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you may and will start advertising through the planning and production stages of the venture. Nevertheless, should you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at the very least a few further weeks, possibly extra, for your marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture begins when you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability enable slightly extra time – possibly a month in total – for production.
