In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious truth to concentrate 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 ultimately consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s arms close to the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they will want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales depends upon your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a local festival or other event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, however take into account that you’ll be higher off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you count on. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you need to remember to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar undertaking – you can and may start marketing during the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. However, should you wait to start advertising till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the least a couple of additional weeks, perhaps more, to your marketing message to achieve the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing project begins while you hand off all the images, text, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability enable a bit additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
