In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the end user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s palms near the start of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for your complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be 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 a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be better off when you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you anticipate. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to enable at least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you must be sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you can and will begin advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. Nevertheless, when you wait to start out marketing till you will have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow no less than just a few additional weeks, perhaps more, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the meant audience and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing mission starts if you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. 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 finished product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must most likely allow slightly extra time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
