In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s palms close to the start of school if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will want and factor it in.
If, then again, you propose 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 want for sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local pageant or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you will be better off if you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you may and should start advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. Nevertheless, should you wait to begin advertising till you have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow not less than a few additional weeks, perhaps more, for your marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge starts once you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which places 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 is often about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability permit a bit of additional time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
