In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately person’s fingers 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 within the consumer’s palms near the start of school if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you enable enough 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 would most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at an area competition or different occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you may be higher off when you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you count on. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must enable a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you may and may start marketing through the planning and production levels of the undertaking. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to begin advertising till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the least a few further weeks, possibly more, in your advertising message to achieve the meant audience and motivate them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing project begins whenever you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (typically sooner when you have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should probably allow just a little further time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.
