In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact 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 just isn’t ultimately user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s hands near the start of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or other event? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but needless to say you will be better off should you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event aren’t what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should permit at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should be sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and may start marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. However, should you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit not less than a number of extra weeks, maybe more, for your marketing message to reach the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing project starts while you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. 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 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 usually about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to most likely allow somewhat extra time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
