In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the end user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s arms close to the start of faculty if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must be sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll 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 venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales depends upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or other occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but take into account that you may be higher off when you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion aren’t what you expect. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to permit not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four 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 be sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you can and may start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you have got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit not less than a few additional weeks, maybe more, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing undertaking starts once you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which 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 is normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit a bit of extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
