In planning any calendar printing venture, the most 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 shouldn’t be in the long run user’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s fingers near the beginning of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales depends upon your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at an area pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you may be higher off should you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, 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.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to you should definitely develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you can and may begin marketing through the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start out advertising until you have got the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit no less than a number of extra weeks, maybe more, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the meant audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins once you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which 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 (typically sooner you probably have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability enable a bit additional time – possibly a month in total – for production.
