In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious truth 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 isn’t ultimately person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers near the beginning of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for the whole project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they will need and issue it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales depends upon your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but take into account that you will be higher off for those who can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event should not what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to permit not less than two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you must be sure to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you’ll be able to and should start advertising and marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nonetheless, when you wait to start out marketing until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the least a number of extra weeks, possibly extra, to your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing mission begins when you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit a bit of extra time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
