In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to pay attention 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 isn’t in the long run consumer’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s fingers near the beginning of college if it is going to be helpful 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 top consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, 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 maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for sales is dependent upon your sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or other occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you may be better off in the event you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event should not what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to permit not less than two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you may and should begin advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. Nevertheless, when you wait to start advertising and marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the least a number of further weeks, maybe more, for your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing undertaking begins whenever you hand off the entire photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. 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 finished product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to probably permit a bit further time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
