In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious reality to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not in the end person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s fingers near the start of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must make sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or different event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you’ll be higher off for those who can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are not what you count on. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you must permit at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you must make sure you develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar project – you possibly can and may begin advertising through the planning and production levels of the challenge. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit a minimum of a couple of further weeks, maybe more, to your advertising message to reach the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts once you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. 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. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to probably permit a bit of further time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
