In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might 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 start of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for your complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must ensure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but keep in mind that you’ll be better off when you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event should not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to allow not less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it’s best to make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar project – you possibly can and should begin marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the challenge. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start advertising till you might have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit no less than just a few further weeks, possibly extra, to your advertising message to reach the intended viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts while you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable just a little additional time – maybe a month in total – for manufacturing.
