In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers close to the beginning of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, 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 gross sales relies on your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area competition or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but remember that you’ll be higher off should you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should allow at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to sell, it is best to make sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar project – you’ll be able to and will start advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start out advertising and marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at the least a few further weeks, possibly extra, on your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing mission starts while you hand off all the images, text, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk 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 when you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely enable slightly additional time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
