In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar isn’t ultimately user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could 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 user’s arms close to the beginning of school if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re 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 contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may want and factor it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for sales depends upon your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or different event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however remember that you will be better off when you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to 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.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you should you should definitely develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you can and may start marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the venture. However, in case you wait to start marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit no less than a few additional weeks, maybe more, to your marketing message to reach the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing project starts while you hand off the entire photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you talk 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 you probably have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should probably enable just a little further time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
