In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t in the long run consumer’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s palms near the start of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for your complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure to permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan 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 much time you want for sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but take into account that you may be higher off should you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you need to allow a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to promote, it’s best to you should definitely develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall length of the calendar undertaking – you may and will begin marketing during the planning and production phases of the project. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start out advertising till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the least a couple of extra weeks, maybe more, to your advertising message to achieve the meant audience and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts while you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably allow slightly additional time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
