In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality 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 ultimately person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s palms close to the start of college if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want 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 enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for gross sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or different event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be better off if you happen to can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or possibly you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you should permit at least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it’s best to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising does not have to add to the general length of the calendar mission – you may and will start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the mission. Nonetheless, when you wait to begin advertising till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow not less than a number of additional weeks, possibly extra, to your advertising message to succeed in the supposed audience and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing project begins while you hand off all the photos, text, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably permit a little bit further time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
