In planning any calendar printing project, the most 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 is not in the long run user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s arms near the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for sales depends upon your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember that you will be better off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you anticipate. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should permit not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar challenge – you may and should start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing stages of the undertaking. However, should you wait to start marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at the very least a couple of further weeks, maybe more, in your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off all of the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner if you have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably enable somewhat additional time – maybe a month in whole – for production.