In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be in the long run person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found 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 palms near 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 challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they will want and issue it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales depends on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or other occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but keep in mind that you’ll be better off in the event you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you need to enable a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to remember to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and may start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the project. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to begin marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit not less than just a few further weeks, maybe extra, on your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission starts once you hand off the entire photographs, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability allow a bit of further time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
