In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is just not ultimately person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s hands close to the start of school if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must be sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they will 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 venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for sales relies on your sales technique. Are you selling at a local festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you’ll be higher off should you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you anticipate. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to sell, you should remember to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar project – you possibly can and will begin advertising throughout the planning and production levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start out advertising and marketing till you could have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at least a number of further weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture begins when you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely allow somewhat extra time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
