In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be in the long run consumer’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s hands near the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to make sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they may need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How a lot time you need for sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or other event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but needless to say you may be higher off if you happen to can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should enable at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar project – you can and may start advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing stages of the venture. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out marketing till you will have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at the least a number of further weeks, maybe extra, to your marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission starts once you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably permit slightly further time – possibly a month in total – for manufacturing.
