In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the end consumer’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s hands close to the start of school if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for your entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want 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 to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, however, you propose 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 gross sales relies on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local festival or different occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be better off for those who can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must permit at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to make sure you develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you may and may begin marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the challenge. Nevertheless, when you wait to start out marketing until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit a minimum of just a few further weeks, possibly more, on your advertising message to succeed in the meant viewers and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing mission starts whenever you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places 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 (sometimes sooner when you have a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely enable slightly extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
