In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s palms close to the start of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine 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 just must make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales relies on your sales technique. Are you selling at a local pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you may be higher off if you happen to can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are not what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should allow at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to sell, you must be sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you may and may start advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the mission. Nonetheless, should you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow no less than a few extra weeks, maybe more, for your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing undertaking starts whenever you hand off the entire pictures, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner if you have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable just a little further time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
