In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the long run person’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s palms close to the start of school if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine 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 just have to ensure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they may want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for gross sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you may be higher off in case you can promote at a number of 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. In that case, you should enable at least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to promote, you must remember to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you may and will begin advertising in the course of the planning and production stages of the venture. However, in case you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at least a number of further weeks, perhaps more, in your advertising message to reach the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking begins if you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability allow somewhat extra time – perhaps a month in total – for manufacturing.
