In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact 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 shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s palms near the beginning of school if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may need and factor it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales relies on your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area festival or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be better off in case you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you count on. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must enable not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it is best to be sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and may start advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out advertising until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the least a couple of extra weeks, maybe extra, to your advertising message to achieve the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking starts whenever you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work 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 lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (typically sooner when you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you must probably allow just a little further time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
