In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is just not in the end user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. 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 beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but take into account that you will be better off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you need to allow no less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you’ll be able to and will start advertising throughout the planning and production phases of the project. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start out advertising and marketing until you will have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at least just a few extra weeks, perhaps more, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the supposed viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture begins while you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. 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 completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must most likely permit somewhat further time – maybe a month in total – for production.
