In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious reality to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t in the long run user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s fingers close to the start of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may want and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you need for sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be higher off should you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion will not be what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to permit at the very least 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, it’s best to be sure you develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising does not have to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you can and should begin marketing through the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. However, if you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the least just a few further weeks, perhaps more, on your marketing message to reach the intended viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely permit a little additional time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
