In planning any calendar printing venture, the most 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, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end consumer’s palms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s fingers near the start of faculty if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for your entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for gross sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but understand that you will be better off if you happen to can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you anticipate. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 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 simply plan to promote, it is best to be sure to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and should start marketing during the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. However, in the event you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at the least a couple of additional weeks, maybe more, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and inspire them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability allow a bit of additional time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
