In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be in the end user’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s hands close to the start of school if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for the whole undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell 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 is dependent upon your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you may be better off for those who can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion aren’t what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must permit at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you must make sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you’ll be able to and will start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the mission. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start out advertising until you may have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at least just a few extra weeks, perhaps more, for your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture begins whenever you hand off all the images, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you talk 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 selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably allow a bit of further time – maybe a month in total – for production.
