In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to pay attention 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 shouldn’t be in the long run user’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s fingers close to the beginning of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for all the venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will want and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and sell 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 will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but needless to say you may be higher off if you happen to can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to permit at the very least two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to be sure to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and may start advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to begin advertising until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow no less than a number of further weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising and marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing challenge begins when you hand off all of the images, text, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a specific deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must most likely allow slightly extra time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
