In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality 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 will not be ultimately consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s palms near the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the 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 are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they will want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you need for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a local competition or other event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you will be better off in the event you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you should make sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you can and should begin marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you could have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit a minimum of just a few further weeks, perhaps extra, to your marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing mission begins whenever you hand off all of the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. 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 finished product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability allow somewhat extra time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
