In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be ultimately consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s hands near the beginning of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a very good timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be higher off should you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you count on. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, it is best to you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall length of the calendar challenge – you can and should begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and production phases of the project. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start out advertising till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at least a couple of further weeks, perhaps more, in your advertising and marketing message to achieve the intended audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing mission starts if you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable slightly further time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
