In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most 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, in case your calendar just isn’t ultimately user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s palms close to the start of school if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for all the mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must make sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they may want and factor it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you may be higher off if you happen to can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow at the least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you must make sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you may and should start marketing through the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. Nevertheless, if you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at the least a number of extra weeks, maybe extra, on your marketing message to succeed in the meant audience and encourage them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing venture begins once you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a selected deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability allow just a little further time – possibly a month in whole – for production.