In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar just isn’t in the end person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s palms near the beginning of faculty if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the whole undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs 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 might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose 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 a lot time you need for sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you’ll be higher off in the event you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you anticipate. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you need to permit at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, it’s best to be sure you develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you’ll be able to and should begin advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start advertising and marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow no less than a few extra weeks, perhaps extra, on your marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing venture starts once you hand off all of the pictures, text, 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 completed product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably permit just a little additional time – maybe a month in total – for manufacturing.
