In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the 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, if your calendar isn’t in the long run person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s hands close to the beginning of faculty if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may want and factor it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you want for sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at an area competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but needless to say you may be better off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are not what you count on. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to allow a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must you should definitely develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar challenge – you may and may start advertising in the course of the planning and production phases of the challenge. However, when you wait to start out marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at least a few extra weeks, perhaps more, in your marketing message to succeed in the meant audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture starts when you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably allow a bit of further time – possibly a month in total – for production.
