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 the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not in the long run user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms near the beginning of school if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area festival or other event? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you may be better off in case you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you must permit a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you should make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar challenge – you can and will start advertising in the course of the planning and production stages of the project. Nevertheless, if you wait to begin advertising until you may have the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at the least just a few further weeks, possibly extra, for your marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing venture starts when you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work 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 is normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a specific deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability enable just a little extra time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
