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 the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the end person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s arms near the start of school if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for your entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and sell 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 is determined by your sales strategy. Are you selling at an area festival or other event? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you may be higher off if you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow at least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you may and should start advertising during the planning and production levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start advertising until you have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit at the very least a couple of additional weeks, perhaps extra, in your marketing message to achieve the meant viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture begins when you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit a little extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
