In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not in the end consumer’s palms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s hands close to the start of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or different event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however understand that you’ll be better off in the event you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you need to enable at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to sell, you must make sure you develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and should begin marketing during the planning and production levels of the mission. Nevertheless, when you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at the very least a couple of additional weeks, perhaps extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the meant viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing challenge starts if you hand off all of the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely allow somewhat further time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
