In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious reality to concentrate 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 long run user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers close to the start of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they may want and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area competition or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however keep in mind that you will be higher off when you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you need to permit at the least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it’s best to you’ll want to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and may begin advertising and marketing through the planning and production levels of the challenge. However, if you wait to start advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at least a number of extra weeks, maybe more, to your advertising and marketing message to achieve the meant viewers and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing venture starts when you hand off all the photographs, text, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability allow slightly further time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
