In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality to pay attention 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 just isn’t in the long run consumer’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s palms near the beginning of faculty if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply have to make sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they may want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales relies on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however remember the fact that you will be higher off should you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must allow not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to you should definitely develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you may and may start advertising during the planning and production phases of the project. However, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at the least a couple of additional weeks, maybe extra, for your marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing project starts whenever you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, advertising, and so on. 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 completed product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must most likely enable slightly extra time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
