In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be in the end user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s hands close to the beginning of school if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for the whole challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that 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 perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, 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 sophisticated. How much time you want for sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or other event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however keep in mind that you may be better off when you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you count on. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best 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.
In case you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar challenge – you may and may start marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nonetheless, if you wait to start out advertising until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the least just a few additional weeks, perhaps more, in your advertising message to reach the intended audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off all the pictures, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely enable a bit further time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
