In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious reality 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 user’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers close to the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for your complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide 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 need to ensure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan 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 a lot time you want for gross sales depends upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or other occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be higher off in case you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event should 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 allow at least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you possibly can and should start marketing through the planning and production phases of the project. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start advertising and marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the very least a few further weeks, maybe more, on your advertising and marketing message to achieve the meant viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins when you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability permit just a little additional time – possibly a month in total – for production.
