In planning any calendar printing venture, the most 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, in case your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s hands close to the start of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must be sure to permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may need and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales depends upon your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a local competition or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however keep in mind that you may be better off when you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to allow at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you may and may start advertising through the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start out advertising until you may have the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow no less than a number of further weeks, possibly more, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project starts when you hand off the entire photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure 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 (sometimes sooner when you have a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit a bit of additional time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
