In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms close to the beginning of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may need and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be better off if you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must enable at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and may start marketing through the planning and production levels of the mission. Nevertheless, should you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you may have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit a minimum of a couple of additional weeks, possibly more, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the meant audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing undertaking starts while you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should most likely enable just a little extra time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
