In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the end person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s palms close to the beginning of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they may need and factor it in.
If, then again, 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 complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you’ll be higher off when you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you expect. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to enable at least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you should be sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar venture – you possibly can and may start marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing stages of the undertaking. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start advertising till you’ve the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at least a few further weeks, possibly extra, for your advertising message to succeed in the intended viewers and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing undertaking begins if you hand off all the photos, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can 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 usually about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a selected deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable a little additional time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
