In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t ultimately consumer’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s fingers near the start of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must make sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they will 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 enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be better off if you happen to can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion will not be what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you should enable at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you must be sure to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you possibly can and should begin marketing throughout the planning and production phases of the challenge. However, if you happen to wait to start out advertising till you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at least just a few extra weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing mission starts while you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a selected deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability permit a bit of extra time – maybe a month in total – for production.
