In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that each 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 long run user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s hands near the beginning of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, however, 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 sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales relies on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however understand that you may be better off when you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you anticipate. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must permit no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should be sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar mission – you may and will begin advertising and marketing during the planning and production stages of the undertaking. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at the very least just a few additional weeks, possibly more, on your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the meant viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing mission starts if you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability allow slightly extra time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
