In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious truth 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 isn’t ultimately person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s hands near the start of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need 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 enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at an area pageant or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however remember the fact that you will be higher off if you happen to can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event usually are not what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must enable no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must be sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar project – you’ll be able to and should begin advertising through the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. Nevertheless, in the event you wait to start advertising until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at least just a few further weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project starts if you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then 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 is normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must most likely allow a little extra time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
