In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not ultimately user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s palms close to the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just 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 local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a local festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however remember that you’ll be better off in case you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you need to permit a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must be sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you can and will start advertising through the planning and manufacturing phases of the mission. Nevertheless, when you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the least just a few additional weeks, possibly extra, for your marketing message to achieve the meant viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins once you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability allow somewhat extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
