In planning any calendar printing challenge, the 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 shouldn’t be in the end user’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s arms close to the beginning of faculty if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for your complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area festival or different occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you’ll be higher off should you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must enable at least two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should make sure to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you can and should start marketing during the planning and production stages of the venture. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start out advertising till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at least a couple of additional weeks, possibly extra, for your marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts whenever you hand off all the photos, 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 finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must probably allow just a little additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
