In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be ultimately person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s hands near the beginning of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, 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 clients or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for gross sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area competition or different occasion? In that case, 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 not what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to enable no less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must be sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the general period of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and should start advertising in the course of the planning and production phases of the challenge. However, should you wait to begin marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow not less than a couple of additional weeks, maybe more, on your marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and motivate them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts while you hand off all the pictures, text, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings 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 lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit a little bit further time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
