In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious reality to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be in the long run user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s palms close to the beginning of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you timeline for your complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they may want and issue it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for sales is dependent upon your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be higher off when you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you anticipate. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you must enable a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to be sure you develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and will begin marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. However, should you wait to start out marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow not less than a couple of additional weeks, maybe more, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing project starts once you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to 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 you probably have a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably allow just a little further time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
