In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality 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 will not be in the long run person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s fingers near the beginning of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that 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 maybe you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you need for sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but remember the fact that you may be higher off if you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you expect. Or possibly you’re 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 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it is best to be sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the overall length of the calendar venture – you can and should begin marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. However, in case you wait to start out marketing until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at least a number of additional weeks, possibly extra, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the meant viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture begins while you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability enable slightly extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
