In planning any calendar printing venture, 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 ultimately person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s hands near the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for your complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales depends on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local pageant or other event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you may be better off in case you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to allow no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must make sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar project – you can and may begin advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. Nevertheless, when you wait to start advertising until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at least a number of further weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising message to achieve the supposed audience and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should most likely permit a bit additional time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
