In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s arms near the start of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for your entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is 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 want and issue it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales depends upon your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however remember that you’ll be better off for those who can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you count on. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to enable at the least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall period of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and should begin advertising during the planning and production stages of the undertaking. However, if you happen to wait to start advertising and marketing until you will have the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at the least a couple of additional weeks, maybe extra, to your marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing venture starts once you hand off all the images, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must probably permit a little bit extra time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
