In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the long run person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s arms near the start of school if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should 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 just must be sure to enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider 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 will need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however keep in mind that you may be better off in the event you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion will not be what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to allow at the least two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to make sure to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and should start marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, if you wait to start advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit not less than a few further weeks, possibly more, to your marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture starts if you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability allow slightly further time – maybe a month in total – for production.
