In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious truth to pay attention 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 isn’t in the long run consumer’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s palms close to the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must make sure you enable sufficient 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 would probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to want 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 bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however take into account that you will be higher off when you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it is best to be sure to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you can and should start marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nonetheless, in the event you wait to start advertising till you could have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the least a few further weeks, maybe extra, to your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture starts while you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts 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 (generally sooner if you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably allow just a little extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
