In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar just isn’t ultimately consumer’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s arms 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 complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales relies on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local pageant or different occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however remember that you will be higher off when you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must allow not less than two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must you should definitely develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you possibly can and may start marketing through the planning and manufacturing phases of the project. However, if you wait to start marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit a minimum of a number of extra weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge starts whenever you hand off the entire photos, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should most likely allow just a little further time – maybe a month in total – for production.
