In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t in the end user’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s arms near the beginning of college if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for all the venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are 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 canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you selling at an area festival or other occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be better off when you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion aren’t what you count on. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to allow at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you should make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and should start marketing through the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. However, should you wait to start advertising and marketing until you may have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at least a couple of extra weeks, possibly more, on your advertising message to succeed in the intended audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge starts whenever you hand off the entire images, text, logos, advertising, and so on. 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. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably enable just a little further time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
