In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the 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, if your calendar will not be ultimately consumer’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s palms close to the start of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to ensure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they will need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be better off when you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you count on. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to permit at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you must be sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar project – you’ll be able to and may begin advertising and marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing stages of the venture. Nevertheless, should you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit no less than a few extra weeks, possibly extra, for your marketing message to reach the supposed audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing project begins whenever you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely enable somewhat further time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
