In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not in the end consumer’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers near the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for your complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your clients 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 contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you need for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area competition or other occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but keep in mind that you may be better off if you happen to can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you anticipate. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to permit at least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to promote, you must you should definitely develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you possibly can and should begin advertising and marketing during the planning and production stages of the mission. However, for those who wait to begin advertising till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the least a couple of additional weeks, maybe more, for your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing project begins whenever you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then 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 lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely enable a bit further time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
