In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is just not in the long run user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s arms near the beginning of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for your entire project.
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 have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to be sure you permit enough 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’s going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you want for sales depends upon your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, however remember that you’ll be higher off if you happen to can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must permit no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it is best to make sure you develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and will begin marketing in the course of the planning and production phases of the venture. However, if you wait to begin marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit at the very least a couple of extra weeks, perhaps extra, to your marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing undertaking begins if you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk 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 particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability allow a bit of extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
