In planning any calendar printing undertaking, 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 end user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s arms near the start of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may need and issue it in.
If, however, you intend 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 much time you want for sales depends on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you may be higher off in case you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you count on. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to permit at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must remember to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you may and should begin advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nevertheless, should you wait to begin marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit not less than a few extra weeks, maybe extra, to your marketing message to reach the supposed viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking starts when you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must most likely enable a little extra time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
