In planning any calendar printing venture, 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, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s palms near the start of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just have to be sure to enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you need for sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area festival or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be higher off when you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow at least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should remember to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you can and may begin advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. Nevertheless, if you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow not less than just a few additional weeks, perhaps more, on your advertising message to reach the supposed viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off all the photos, text, logos, advertising, 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 completed product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely allow a little further time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
