In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t ultimately person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s fingers near the start of school if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for your complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however remember the fact that you may be higher off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are not what you anticipate. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you need to permit not less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to promote, it’s best to be sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and may start advertising during the planning and production stages of the project. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start marketing until you will have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at the very least a couple of further weeks, maybe more, for your marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts while you hand off all the pictures, text, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should probably allow a little bit extra time – maybe a month in complete – for manufacturing.
