In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious fact 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 shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they could already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s fingers close to the beginning of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for your complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s arms? 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 possibly you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to be sure to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may need and issue it in.
If, however, 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 sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or other event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you’ll be higher off if you happen to can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event should not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you should you should definitely develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you possibly can and should begin marketing through the planning and manufacturing levels of the mission. Nevertheless, for those who wait to start out advertising and marketing till you’ve the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit no less than a number of further weeks, possibly extra, for your marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing mission starts when you hand off the entire images, text, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it is best to most likely allow somewhat additional time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
