In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to pay attention 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 just isn’t in the long run consumer’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms near the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for your entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to ensure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further 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 venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local pageant or different event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however remember that you may be higher off if you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must allow not less than two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it is best to make sure to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and should start advertising and marketing through the planning and production stages of the undertaking. However, should you wait to start out marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the least just a few extra weeks, possibly more, to your advertising message to succeed in the intended viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing undertaking begins once you hand off all of the images, text, logos, promoting, etc. 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 completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to probably enable a bit of additional time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
