In planning any calendar printing project, the 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, if your calendar is just not ultimately person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s palms near the start of faculty if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a local pageant or other event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but take into account that you may be better off should you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to enable at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it is best to remember to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you possibly can and will begin marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. Nonetheless, should you wait to begin marketing till you could have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow not less than a few extra weeks, possibly more, to your advertising message to succeed in the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing venture starts while you hand off the entire photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure 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 (sometimes sooner in case you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must most likely allow a bit of further time – possibly a month in total – for production.
