45 Day Expiration List

In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the end consumer’s hands before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s arms close to the beginning of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for your entire undertaking.

How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just need to be sure to allow enough 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 would in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they’ll 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 venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different event? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you’ll be better off in case you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should permit at least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.

Should you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it is best to make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and should start marketing in the course of the planning and production levels of the challenge. However, if you happen to wait to begin advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the very least just a few additional weeks, perhaps extra, on your advertising message to achieve the meant audience and inspire them to buy.

The production part of a calendar printing venture begins when you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability enable slightly extra time – perhaps a month in total – for production.