In planning any calendar printing project, 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, in case your calendar is not in the long run person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s hands near the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to ensure you permit sufficient 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’s going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may need and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for sales is dependent upon your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or different occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but keep in mind that you may be higher off in the event you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to permit at least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must you should definitely develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar venture – you possibly can and will start advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing phases of the mission. Nonetheless, for those who wait to begin marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit at least a couple of further weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the meant audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing project begins if you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a specific deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to most likely allow somewhat further time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
