In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t in the long run user’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s arms close to the start of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a great timeline for your complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want 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 venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a local pageant or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you’ll be higher off should you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event should not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to enable at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to be sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you can and will begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the project. However, in the event you wait to start advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit not less than just a few extra weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the supposed audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge starts while you hand off all the pictures, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure 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 if in case you have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability allow slightly further time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.
