In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s hands near the beginning of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for the whole undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you may be higher off in the event you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to enable at least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and will begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and production phases of the challenge. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start out marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow no less than just a few additional weeks, maybe more, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking starts while you hand off all of the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss 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 in case you have a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should most likely permit somewhat extra time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
