In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s arms close to the start of faculty if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you need for sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at an area competition or different occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however understand that you will be higher off if you happen to can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are not what you expect. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must enable not less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to sell, it’s best to remember to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar project – you’ll be able to and may begin advertising through the planning and production phases of the undertaking. Nonetheless, if you wait to start advertising until you have got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit no less than a few further weeks, perhaps more, for your advertising message to reach the meant audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing undertaking starts whenever you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability allow a bit extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
