In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious reality 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 just isn’t in the end user’s palms before January 1, 2014, they may have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s hands close to the beginning of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must ensure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either 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 determined by your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember that you will be better off should you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to enable not less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you should be sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall length of the calendar mission – you can and should start marketing during the planning and production stages of the mission. Nonetheless, should you wait to start out advertising until you have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at least a couple of additional weeks, perhaps extra, on your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant viewers and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge starts once you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure 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 particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable a bit of additional time – possibly a month in total – for manufacturing.
