In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious reality 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 ultimately consumer’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may 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 person’s fingers close to the beginning of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for all the mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for sales will depend on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however take into account that you will be better off in the event you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to sell, you should make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and should start marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the undertaking. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start out advertising until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at least a few additional weeks, possibly extra, on your advertising message to succeed in the intended viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing undertaking begins once you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then puts 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 is often about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability allow a little bit further time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
