In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be in the end person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms near the beginning of faculty if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for your complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with 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 extra time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or different occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you will be better off if you happen to can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you count on. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to permit not less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar challenge – you may and will begin advertising through the planning and manufacturing stages of the undertaking. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start out advertising till you’ve the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow not less than a number of extra weeks, perhaps more, to your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing venture begins if you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely permit somewhat extra time – possibly a month in total – for manufacturing.
