In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious fact to concentrate 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 will not be in the long run person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s palms near the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you permit 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 can in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales depends upon your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you will be higher off in case you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event will not be what you count on. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you should allow at least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you must be sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general length of the calendar venture – you possibly can and may begin advertising through the planning and production phases of the challenge. However, for those who wait to start out marketing until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit a minimum of a few additional weeks, perhaps more, in your marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing undertaking begins if you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should most likely enable a little bit additional time – possibly a month in total – for manufacturing.
