In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s hands close to the beginning of faculty if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great 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 must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and factor it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at an area festival or other event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however remember that you may be better off if you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you should enable at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and should start advertising during the planning and manufacturing phases of the venture. However, if you happen to wait to begin marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow not less than just a few further weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project begins once you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. 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 speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you must most likely allow a little additional time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
