In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious truth to pay attention 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 ultimately consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s arms close to the start of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you selling at an area competition or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you may be better off in the event you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event should not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to permit at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it is best to remember to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and should start advertising through the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. Nonetheless, if you wait to start advertising until you have got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the least just a few further weeks, possibly extra, on your marketing message to achieve the intended audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished 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 (typically sooner you probably have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably enable a bit further time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
