In planning any calendar printing project, the 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 shouldn’t be in the end person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s palms close to the start of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s hands? 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 maybe you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to be sure to enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they will want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but take into account that you will be better off if you happen to can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you should make sure you develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you can and should start advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. However, in the event you wait to start marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit no less than a couple of additional weeks, possibly more, for your advertising message to reach the meant audience and motivate them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge starts if you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability permit a bit of further time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
