In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious fact 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 end consumer’s palms 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 needs to be in the person’s fingers near the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or other event? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but remember that you will be better off should you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you count on. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you should enable no less than two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should make sure you develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar challenge – you’ll be able to and should begin marketing through the planning and production stages of the undertaking. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start advertising till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow a minimum of just a few extra weeks, possibly extra, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture starts once you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to probably enable somewhat extra time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
