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, in case your calendar is not ultimately user’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s hands near the start of school if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for your entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but take into account that you may be better off if you happen to can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to enable a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must make sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall length of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and should start marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the undertaking. However, in the event you wait to start out marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at least a couple of further weeks, perhaps more, to your marketing message to reach the meant viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off all of the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to 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 when you’ve got a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably enable slightly extra time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.
