In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is just not ultimately user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could 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 close to the start of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a very good timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they may want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or different event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you’ll be higher off should you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you count on. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should permit no less than two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should be sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and may start advertising through the planning and manufacturing phases of the venture. However, when you wait to start advertising and marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow no less than a couple of additional weeks, maybe more, on your advertising message to succeed in the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission starts if you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to probably allow just a little additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
