In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be in the long run person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s arms near the beginning of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for sales depends upon your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but needless to say you may be better off if you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you anticipate. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to remember to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you may and will start marketing during the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. Nonetheless, if you wait to start advertising until you might have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit a minimum of a couple of extra weeks, maybe more, on your advertising message to succeed in the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing mission begins whenever you hand off the entire photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. 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. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should most likely allow a little further time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
