In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately consumer’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s hands near the start of college if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for the complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’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 determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must ensure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local festival or other occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but take into account that you’ll be better off when you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to be sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall length of the calendar project – you’ll be able to and should begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out advertising until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at the very least a few additional weeks, perhaps more, on your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking starts when you hand off the entire photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished 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 (generally sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability enable somewhat further time – perhaps a month in total – for manufacturing.
