In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is just not in the long run consumer’s arms before 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 must be within the person’s hands close to the start of school if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for your entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they will need and factor it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or different occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but take into account that you will be better off when you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion will not be what you anticipate. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you need to enable at the very least two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you must make sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar venture – you possibly can and will start advertising through the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nevertheless, in case you wait to start advertising and marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit not less than a number of additional weeks, possibly more, in your marketing message to reach the supposed audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing project starts when you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, promoting, etc. 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 finished product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable a little additional time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
