In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be ultimately person’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s hands close to the start of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must be sure to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales depends on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a local festival or different occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but keep in mind that you will be higher off if you happen to can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to enable not less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and will start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production phases of the mission. However, when you wait to start marketing till you could have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit not less than a few extra weeks, possibly more, to your advertising and marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing mission begins when you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely permit a bit of additional time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
