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 a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s fingers near the start of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for all the mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure you allow sufficient 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’s going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or other event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be better off in case you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you count on. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you should allow no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to remember to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and will begin marketing during the planning and production stages of the mission. Nonetheless, for those who wait to begin advertising and marketing until you have got the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the very least a number of further weeks, maybe extra, for your marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing project starts once you hand off all of the images, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably permit a little additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
