In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact to concentrate 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 shouldn’t be in the long run person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s palms near the start of school if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you want for sales relies on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you’ll be better off should you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should allow at the least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you can and will begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and production stages of the undertaking. Nevertheless, in case you wait to begin advertising until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow a minimum of just a few further weeks, perhaps extra, for your advertising message to succeed in the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture starts while you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then 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 if you have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably enable just a little additional time – maybe a month in total – for manufacturing.
