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 the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar isn’t ultimately user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s hands close to the start of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a very good timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’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 have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just have to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they will need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you’ll be better off if you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should permit at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to sell, you must make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar mission – you possibly can and may start advertising in the course of the planning and production levels of the venture. However, if you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at least a few extra weeks, possibly more, to your advertising message to reach the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing project begins while you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which 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 lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely permit a little additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
