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, if your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s arms close to the start of school if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to 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 need to be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to 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 venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales relies on your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different event? In that case, then that provides 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 will not be what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to enable a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should make sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar project – you can and may start marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the project. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start out marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow not less than a number of extra weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking starts once you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to most likely permit a bit of extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
