In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s palms near the start of school if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for your entire challenge.
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 figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure you allow enough 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 is going to probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for gross sales depends on your sales technique. Are you selling at a local festival or different occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you may be higher off if you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should be sure you develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and will start advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. Nevertheless, should you wait to start out advertising till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow a minimum of a couple of further weeks, perhaps more, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing undertaking starts if you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. 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 finished product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must most likely enable a little additional time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
