In planning any calendar printing undertaking, 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, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end person’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms close to the start of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to ensure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose 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 need for gross sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local pageant or different occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, however take into account that you may be higher off for those who can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you need to make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall length of the calendar venture – you can and should begin advertising through the planning and production phases of the undertaking. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out advertising until you have got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the least a couple of additional weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge starts when you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork 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 long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to probably allow a little bit additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
