In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the end consumer’s palms before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s palms close to the beginning of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for your entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to be sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell 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 sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you may be higher off in case you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you should allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and may begin advertising throughout the planning and production stages of the mission. However, if you wait to start advertising until you have got the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at least a number of additional weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising message to reach the supposed audience and motivate them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge starts whenever you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely enable a little bit further time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
