In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious fact 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 just isn’t ultimately user’s palms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s hands close to the beginning of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a very good timeline for your complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you selling at an area festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you will be better off for those who can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you count on. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you should enable not less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to remember to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you’ll be able to and will begin marketing in the course of the planning and production phases of the venture. However, when you wait to start marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the least a few additional weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising message to achieve the supposed viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing project begins whenever you hand off all the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability enable a little bit additional time – possibly a month in total – for production.
