In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious reality to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar isn’t in the end person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s hands near the start of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for your complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however needless to say you will be better off if you happen to can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it’s best to you should definitely develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you may and should start advertising during the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start advertising and marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at the very least a couple of further weeks, perhaps extra, on your advertising message to reach the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge begins while you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely allow somewhat additional time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
