In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality to concentrate 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 in the long run consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s fingers close to the beginning of school if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for gross sales depends upon your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area festival or other event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you’ll be higher off when you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you expect. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to enable no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and will begin marketing through the planning and production levels of the mission. Nevertheless, should you wait to start out marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow not less than a couple of further weeks, maybe extra, for your advertising message to reach the intended audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture starts when you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability allow a little bit further time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
