In planning any calendar printing project, 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, if your calendar is just not in the long run user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s hands near the start of college if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for your complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must make sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy 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. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they may want and issue it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area competition or other occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however keep in mind that you may be higher off if you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are not what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to enable at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it’s best to make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you can and may start marketing throughout the planning and production levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start out advertising until you could have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit not less than a number of extra weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge begins when you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then 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 lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably allow slightly extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
