In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s hands near the start of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you will be better off if you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event should not what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you should permit not less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and should start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the challenge. However, for those who wait to start marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at the least a number of additional weeks, maybe extra, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins whenever you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, advertising, and many others. 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. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should probably permit a little bit additional time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
