In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run consumer’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s fingers close to the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for all the mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to be sure to enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they will want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or other event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you will be better off should you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to enable no less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to be sure you develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and will start marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. Nevertheless, should you wait to start advertising till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the very least a couple of further weeks, maybe extra, for your marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking starts while you hand off all of the photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a selected deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit slightly extra time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
