In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be in the end consumer’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they may have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s hands near the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for the whole undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra 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 little more sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, however remember the fact that you will be better off for those who can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion usually are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and will start marketing in the course of the planning and production phases of the undertaking. However, should you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit a minimum of just a few additional weeks, maybe extra, on your advertising and marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing undertaking begins when you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. 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 finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to most likely permit a bit of further time – possibly a month in total – for production.
