In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious fact 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 will not be in the end consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s hands close to the start of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they will want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for sales relies on your sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or other occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but needless to say you’ll be higher off for those who can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you should allow a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally 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 you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and should begin advertising and marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the challenge. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow no less than just a few further weeks, maybe extra, on your advertising message to achieve the intended viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing project starts whenever you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you speak 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 if you have a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely enable slightly further time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
