In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality 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 just not in the end user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers near the start of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will want and factor it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for gross sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or other occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, however keep in mind that you may be higher off if you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to permit not less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it is best to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall length of the calendar challenge – you can and will begin advertising during the planning and production stages of the challenge. However, if you happen to wait to start advertising and marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow no less than a number of extra weeks, maybe more, in your advertising message to achieve the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing project begins if you hand off all the pictures, text, logos, promoting, and many others. 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. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should probably allow a little bit additional time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
