In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be in the end consumer’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s palms close to the beginning of college if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for your entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a local competition or different occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but keep in mind that you may be better off in the event you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you anticipate. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you must enable at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and should start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and production phases of the challenge. Nonetheless, if you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the very least a couple of further weeks, possibly more, to your marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing project starts while you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability allow a bit additional time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
