In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar isn’t in the long run person’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers close to the start of college if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will want and issue it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you may be better off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion aren’t what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow not less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must you’ll want to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar project – you may and may start advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the project. Nevertheless, in case you wait to start out marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at the least just a few extra weeks, maybe more, to your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge begins while you hand off all of the photos, text, logos, advertising, and many others. 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 finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably permit slightly additional time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.
