In planning any calendar printing mission, 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, in case your calendar will not be in the end person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s arms close to the start of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for your complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must ensure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may want and issue it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for sales depends upon your sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you may be better off when you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must allow at the least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you need to be sure to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you can and should begin marketing through the planning and manufacturing stages of the undertaking. However, if you wait to start out advertising till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at least a couple of further weeks, possibly extra, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the supposed audience and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing project begins once you hand off the entire photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you must most likely allow a bit additional time – maybe a month in total – for manufacturing.
