In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious reality to pay attention 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 shouldn’t be in the long run person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers near the start of school if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for all the mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’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 will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to make sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either 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 local pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you will be higher off if you happen to can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event aren’t what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you must enable at least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should make sure you develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and should begin marketing in the course of the planning and production stages of the mission. However, if you wait to start out advertising until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the very least just a few further weeks, possibly extra, for your advertising message to reach the supposed viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project begins once you hand off all the photographs, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability enable somewhat additional time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
