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 shouldn’t be in the long run person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s fingers close to the start of college if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for your complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just have to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they will 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 enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you selling at an area competition or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however 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 event should not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must enable at least two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you may and may start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start advertising till you could have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at the least just a few extra weeks, possibly more, for your advertising message to reach the meant audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing undertaking starts once you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit somewhat further time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
