In planning any calendar printing mission, the most 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, in case your calendar is not ultimately user’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s fingers near the start of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for the whole mission.
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 decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to make sure you allow 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 should in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you want for gross sales relies on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however keep in mind that you may be higher off in the event you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion will not be what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must enable at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you should remember to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the overall length of the calendar venture – you can and should begin marketing throughout the planning and production phases of the project. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start out marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow no less than a few additional weeks, maybe more, to your advertising message to succeed in the meant audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing venture starts when you hand off the entire photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit a little bit further time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
