In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact 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 isn’t in the long run person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms close to the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to 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 may need and factor it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you need for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area competition or different event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but take into account that you’ll be better off if you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you should enable at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, it is best to make sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you may and should start marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing stages of the venture. Nevertheless, should you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the very least a couple of further weeks, possibly extra, on your advertising message to achieve the supposed viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking begins while you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner when you have a specific deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to most likely allow slightly further time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
