In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s fingers near the start of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it can most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales depends upon your sales strategy. Are you selling at an area pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you may be higher off if you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to permit no less than two weeks, and ideally up to four 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 simply plan to promote, you should you should definitely develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you can and will start marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. However, for those who wait to start advertising till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow a minimum of a couple of further weeks, possibly more, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. 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 completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely enable a bit of additional time – perhaps a month in total – for manufacturing.
