In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be in the end user’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s fingers near the start of school if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or other event? If so, then that provides you a deadline, however remember that you’ll be better off should you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to enable a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you possibly can and should begin advertising and marketing during the planning and production levels of the mission. Nonetheless, should you wait to begin advertising until you have got the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit a minimum of a couple of further weeks, possibly extra, on your advertising message to achieve the supposed audience and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture starts while you hand off the entire images, text, 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. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably allow a bit extra time – maybe a month in total – for production.
