In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the long run person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they may already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s palms close to the start of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for your entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area competition or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you will be better off when you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to enable no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to be sure you develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar project – you possibly can and should begin advertising and marketing through the planning and production stages of the challenge. Nevertheless, in the event you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at least a couple of extra weeks, maybe extra, to your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing project starts if you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability enable just a little additional time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
