In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious fact 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 isn’t in the long run consumer’s fingers 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 palms near the beginning of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you allow 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’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they will need and factor it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and promote 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 will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local festival or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but take into account that you will be higher off should you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you anticipate. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should allow a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as four 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 just plan to sell, you must remember to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar undertaking – you may and will begin marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. However, if you happen to wait to begin marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at least a few additional weeks, possibly more, in your marketing message to achieve the intended audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing mission starts once you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability enable somewhat additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
