In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the end user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms close to the start of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be relatively 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 clients or members; in that case you simply need to be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How a lot time you want for sales depends upon your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a local pageant or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you will be higher off in case you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to permit no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to make sure to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you possibly can and will start marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the venture. However, in case you wait to start advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit a minimum of a few extra weeks, possibly more, on your marketing message to achieve the intended audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project begins once you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, advertising, and so forth. 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 (generally sooner you probably have a specific deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability enable somewhat extra time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
