In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s hands close to the beginning of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you plan 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 sales depends upon your sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you may be better off should you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event aren’t what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to make sure you develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar project – you can and will start marketing through the planning and manufacturing stages of the venture. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at least a few additional weeks, maybe extra, on your advertising message to reach the meant audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing mission starts if you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to probably enable a little bit extra time – maybe a month in total – for production.
