In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar isn’t ultimately consumer’s hands before 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 must be within the user’s hands near the start of faculty if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for the whole venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider 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 to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for gross sales relies on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however remember the fact that you may be better off when you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must permit a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it’s best to be sure to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you possibly can and should start advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the project. However, should you wait to start out marketing until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the least a couple of additional weeks, perhaps more, in your advertising message to succeed in the intended audience and inspire them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing project starts when you hand off all the photos, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts 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 usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability allow somewhat further time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
