In planning any calendar printing undertaking, 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, if your calendar will not be in the long run person’s hands earlier than 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 needs to be within the person’s hands close to the beginning of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales depends on your sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but take into account that you will be higher off in case you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you anticipate. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should permit at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to remember to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar project – you may and should start marketing during the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. However, when you wait to begin advertising until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow a minimum of a few additional weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture begins when you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to probably enable just a little extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
