In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately person’s arms 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 consumer’s arms near the start of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or other event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you may be higher off should you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should allow not less than two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it is best to remember to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and may start advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. Nonetheless, in the event you wait to start advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit no less than just a few additional weeks, possibly more, to your marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to 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 in case you have a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably allow slightly further time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
