In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious truth to concentrate 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 just not in the end user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s hands close to the beginning of faculty if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they may need and factor it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for gross sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be higher off in case you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion aren’t what you count on. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to permit a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you may and may begin marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. Nevertheless, for those who wait to begin advertising and marketing until you will have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow a minimum of a couple of additional weeks, perhaps more, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing mission starts once you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable a bit of additional time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
