In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t in the long run consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms close to the beginning of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they will need and factor it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or other event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be better off in the event you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion aren’t what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to permit at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to make sure you develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar venture – you may and may begin advertising in the course of the planning and production levels of the venture. However, for those who wait to start out marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at the least a few further weeks, possibly extra, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture starts once you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely permit a little additional time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
