In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious reality to pay attention 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 is just not in the end person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s palms close to the start of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area festival or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be higher off if you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to enable no less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall length of the calendar undertaking – you can and will start advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, when you wait to start out advertising till you have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the very least a couple of extra weeks, perhaps more, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing undertaking begins if you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork 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 often about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability allow just a little additional time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
