In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious fact 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 long run person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might 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 consumer’s palms close to the beginning of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, 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 are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must make sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area festival or different occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you’ll be higher off should you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are not what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to allow at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you can and should begin advertising through the planning and manufacturing phases of the venture. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to begin advertising and marketing until you have got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit a minimum of a few extra weeks, perhaps extra, in your marketing message to achieve the meant audience and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking starts whenever you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which 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 is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably enable a little extra time – maybe a month in total – for production.
