In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious truth 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 will not be in the end user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s hands near the start of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need 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, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales depends upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you may be higher off when you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you expect. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you need to enable at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, it’s best to make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you may and should start advertising in the course of the planning and production stages of the project. Nonetheless, in the event you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit no less than a few extra weeks, possibly more, on your advertising message to reach the supposed viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing mission starts if you hand off all the photos, text, logos, advertising, and so on. 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 completed product. Make sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a selected deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability allow just a little additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
