In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious fact 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 just isn’t ultimately person’s arms 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 needs to be within the consumer’s arms near the start of school if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a very good timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a local pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be higher off for those who can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event should not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, 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 some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must you’ll want to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the overall period of the calendar challenge – you may and should begin advertising and marketing through the planning and production stages of the venture. Nevertheless, should you wait to start marketing till you could have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit no less than a couple of further weeks, perhaps extra, to your marketing message to achieve the meant audience and motivate them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing project begins when you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts 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’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to probably permit just a little additional time – possibly a month in total – for production.
