In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious truth to concentrate 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 will not be in the end person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s hands close to the start of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine 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 simply have to make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or different event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but keep in mind 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 anticipate. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to permit a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to you’ll want to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you may and should start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nevertheless, should you wait to start marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit at the very least a couple of further weeks, possibly extra, on your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the meant viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing mission begins when you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. 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 finished product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably permit a bit additional time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
