In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the end person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they may have already got 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 palms close to the beginning of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may want and issue 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 enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a local competition or different occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be better off if you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are not what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to permit at the least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to sell, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and will begin advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing phases of the venture. However, for those who wait to start advertising until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at least just a few further weeks, perhaps more, on your marketing message to reach the supposed viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project begins whenever you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable slightly further time – possibly a month in total – for production.
