In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious reality 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 isn’t ultimately person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s hands close to the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they will want and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area festival or other occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be higher off in the event you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to allow at least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and will begin marketing in the course of the planning and production phases of the undertaking. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start out advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at the least a couple of extra weeks, maybe more, to your advertising message to reach the intended audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing mission begins whenever you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, 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. 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 when you’ve got a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should most likely allow somewhat additional time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
