In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the long run consumer’s arms earlier than 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 in the user’s palms near the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for your entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to be sure to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for gross sales depends upon your sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or different occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however understand that you will be better off should you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion usually are not what you count on. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you must remember to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and will begin marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. Nonetheless, when you wait to start out advertising until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the least a number of extra weeks, maybe more, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge begins if you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss 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 selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably enable a little bit additional time – maybe a month in whole – for production.