In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s fingers close to the start of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you enable sufficient 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’s going to probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales relies on your sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or other event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but keep in mind that you will be higher off for those who can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you need to allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it’s best to make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and will start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. However, if you wait to start advertising and marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit not less than a couple of additional weeks, perhaps more, for your advertising message to succeed in the meant audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking begins when you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely permit just a little additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
