In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be in the end user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s fingers close to the start of school if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at an area festival or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but keep in mind that you will be better off if you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you anticipate. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to make sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall length of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and may begin marketing through the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. However, for those who wait to start advertising till you have got the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit no less than a couple of further weeks, possibly more, on your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing mission begins once you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, and so on. 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 finished product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to probably enable slightly further time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
