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 the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar just isn’t in the end consumer’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they could already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s palms close to the start of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, 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 might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local competition or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember that you may be better off when you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should permit at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and should start advertising and marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nevertheless, if you wait to begin advertising till you could have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at least a few further weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising and marketing message to achieve the intended audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing challenge begins when you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable a little bit additional time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
