In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the long run consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s arms close to the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for the whole project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just have to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different event? If so, then that provides you a deadline, however take into account that you’ll be better off in the event you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must enable no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar venture – you may and should start advertising in the course of the planning and production stages of the undertaking. Nevertheless, if you wait to begin advertising until you could have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit no less than a number of extra weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. 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 talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a specific deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably permit somewhat further time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
