In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious fact to pay attention 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 shouldn’t be in the long run person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s fingers close to the beginning of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for the complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area festival or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but keep in mind that you will be higher off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to enable at the least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it is best to make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you can and may start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. However, in the event you wait to begin marketing until you may have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at least a number of further weeks, possibly more, on your advertising and marketing message to reach the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing mission begins whenever you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure 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 (typically sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably enable a little bit further time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
