In planning any calendar printing project, 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, in case your calendar just isn’t ultimately person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s hands near the beginning of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for the whole challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for gross sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local competition or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you may be higher off if you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you count on. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to allow at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and may start advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. However, for those who wait to start out advertising and marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow a minimum of a few further weeks, perhaps more, on your advertising message to succeed in the meant viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing undertaking begins whenever you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to speak 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 when you’ve got a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability permit somewhat extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
