In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is just not in the long run consumer’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s palms close to the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for sales relies on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you will be higher off if you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you count on. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to enable no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to be sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you may and will begin advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. Nonetheless, in the event you wait to start out marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit a minimum of a few further weeks, maybe extra, to your marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge begins when you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability permit a bit extra time – maybe a month in total – for production.
