In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not in the end user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s palms near the beginning of school if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to ensure 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 would probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they will want and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you will be higher off should you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you expect. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to allow at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it is best to you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and will begin marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. Nevertheless, for those who wait to start advertising and marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at least a couple of further weeks, possibly more, to your marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should most likely enable somewhat further time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
