In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact to concentrate 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 shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s palms close to the beginning of school if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may need and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local pageant or different occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you may be higher off if you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to be sure you develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you can and will begin advertising through the planning and manufacturing phases of the mission. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you will have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the very least a number of extra weeks, possibly more, in your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture starts when you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to probably enable somewhat extra time – possibly a month in total – for production.
