In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact 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 shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s hands close to the start of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or other event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you will be higher off in case you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to enable no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you must make sure you develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar mission – you can and may start advertising and marketing through the planning and production phases of the project. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start out marketing till you could have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow not less than a number of extra weeks, possibly more, to your advertising message to reach the intended audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing undertaking starts whenever you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then places 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’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely enable slightly further time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
