In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the long run user’s palms before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternate. 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 faculty if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for all the mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the 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 possibly you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for sales depends on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local pageant or different occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but take into account that you’ll be better off if you happen to can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion will not be what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you should permit at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general length of the calendar project – you can and may begin marketing in the course of the planning and production levels of the undertaking. Nevertheless, in case you wait to start out marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow a minimum of a number of additional weeks, possibly more, for your advertising message to achieve the meant viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing mission starts whenever you hand off all of the images, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner if you have a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to probably allow somewhat further time – possibly a month in total – for manufacturing.
