In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not in the end consumer’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers close to the start of school if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to be sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may need and factor it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be better off if you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you anticipate. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to sell, it’s best to make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and should start advertising during the planning and manufacturing phases of the challenge. However, in the event you wait to start marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow not less than a number of additional weeks, possibly more, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing venture begins whenever you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably permit a bit of further time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
