In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar isn’t ultimately consumer’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s hands near the beginning of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for sales is dependent upon your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local pageant or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember that you may be better off if you happen to can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you count on. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it’s best to be sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar challenge – you may and will start marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. However, for those who wait to start out advertising until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at the least a couple of further weeks, maybe extra, to your advertising message to reach the intended audience and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing project begins while you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. 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 you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely enable somewhat extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
