In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s palms near the beginning of school if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought 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 possibly you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and promote 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 relies on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but take into account that you’ll be better off if you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you expect. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should permit at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and should start advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. However, when you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit at the very least a number of extra weeks, perhaps more, on your advertising and marketing message to reach the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing project begins once you hand off the entire images, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability enable a little bit additional time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
