In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be ultimately person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may 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 palms near the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for your entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s arms? 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 might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to 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 venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for gross sales depends on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local competition or other event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however remember that you will be better off if you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to allow not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to sell, it’s best to you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you can and may begin advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the project. However, for those who wait to start out advertising and marketing until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow not less than a couple of further weeks, perhaps more, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing project begins once you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability permit a bit extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
