In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that each 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 earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s palms close to the start of college if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must be sure to permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, then again, 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 difficult. How a lot time you need for sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be better off for those who can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to enable at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to be sure you develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you may and will start marketing during the planning and production phases of the project. Nonetheless, in the event you wait to start advertising until you will have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow a minimum of just a few further weeks, possibly extra, on your marketing message to reach the supposed audience and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability allow a little further time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.
