In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be in the long run consumer’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s hands near the start of college if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they may need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales depends on your sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you may be higher off if you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you count on. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to allow not less than two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should you should definitely develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and will begin marketing during the planning and production phases of the project. However, for those who wait to start advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the least just a few extra weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing undertaking begins while you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure 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 (sometimes sooner you probably have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should most likely enable a bit of extra time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
