In planning any calendar printing challenge, 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, if your calendar will not be ultimately consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s arms close to the beginning of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for your complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it can most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you want for gross sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or other event? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be better off if you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you anticipate. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to allow not less than two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you possibly can and should begin marketing in the course of the planning and production levels of the undertaking. Nonetheless, when you wait to start marketing till you’ve the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the very least a few additional weeks, possibly more, to your advertising message to reach the intended viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing project starts while you hand off the entire photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably allow slightly extra time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
