In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious truth 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 isn’t in the end consumer’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers near the beginning of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you need for gross sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you’ll be higher off when you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you count on. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it’s best to make sure you develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and may begin advertising in the course of the planning and production stages of the mission. However, in case you wait to begin advertising till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the least a few further weeks, possibly extra, on your advertising message to reach the supposed viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing mission begins when you hand off all the photos, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability permit a little bit further time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
