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 a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run user’s palms before 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 needs to be in the person’s fingers close to the beginning of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for your complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales depends upon your sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however take into account that you’ll be higher off should you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you should allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and may start advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, in the event you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow not less than just a few further weeks, possibly extra, on your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge begins when you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then 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 long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability allow slightly additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
