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, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s fingers close to the start of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must 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 deal with mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may want and issue it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, however remember the fact that you’ll be better off if you happen to can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you count on. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you should enable a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar project – you possibly can and will start marketing through the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit no less than a few additional weeks, maybe more, to your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing mission begins once you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. 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 finished product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely allow slightly further time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.