In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious truth 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 shouldn’t be ultimately person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s palms near the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the whole challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’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 have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to be sure to permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you 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, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for sales depends on your sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however understand that you’ll be higher off in the event you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion usually are not what you count on. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to permit at least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you can and may begin advertising through the planning and production stages of the mission. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start out marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the least a number of further weeks, perhaps more, to your marketing message to reach the meant viewers and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge begins whenever you hand off all the images, text, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it is best to most likely allow a little further time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.