In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact 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 isn’t in the end user’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s arms close to the start of school if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they may need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose 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 relies on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local competition or other event? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be better off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you count on. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must permit at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you must make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar mission – you can and will start advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to begin advertising till you’ve the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at the least a few extra weeks, possibly extra, to your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing project begins if you hand off all the photos, text, logos, advertising, and many others. 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 speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably permit a little extra time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
