In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t in the end user’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s arms close to the beginning of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, 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 a lot time you need for sales is dependent upon your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you will be higher off in the event you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you count on. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to permit a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you can and should start advertising and marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. Nevertheless, should you wait to start advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow no less than a number of extra weeks, maybe more, to your marketing message to achieve the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project begins while you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. 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 finished product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit a little bit further time – maybe a month in total – for manufacturing.
