In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not ultimately user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s palms near the beginning of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for your entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want 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, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they will want and issue it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales relies on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you will be better off when you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar challenge – you can and should begin advertising throughout the planning and production levels of the venture. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to begin advertising and marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit at the least a number of extra weeks, perhaps extra, on your advertising and marketing message to reach the supposed viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge begins when you hand off the entire photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable a bit of further time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
