In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s palms near the beginning of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the whole undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or other event? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but keep in mind that you’ll be better off if you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it is best to be sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar project – you may and may start advertising during the planning and manufacturing phases of the venture. However, in the event you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you have got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit no less than just a few extra weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising message to achieve the meant viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing project begins whenever you hand off all the images, text, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to probably enable slightly extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
