In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms close to the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for the complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to make sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for gross sales relies on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a local pageant or other event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you may be higher off if you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event should not what you anticipate. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to permit 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 want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and should start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. Nevertheless, when you wait to start out marketing till you will have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the very least a few extra weeks, maybe extra, to your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge begins while you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely enable a bit of extra time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
