In planning any calendar printing venture, the most 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 isn’t in the long run person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s fingers near the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but take into account that you may be better off when you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event aren’t what you anticipate. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you need to allow no less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 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 sell, you need 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 length of the calendar challenge – you may and may begin marketing through the planning and production phases of the mission. However, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at least a couple of additional weeks, maybe more, on your marketing message to reach the meant viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture begins whenever you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably allow a bit further time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
