In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s fingers close to the beginning of school if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may need and issue it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you will be higher off should you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event should not what you anticipate. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to enable at the very least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you must be sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar mission – you can and should begin advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start advertising till you have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow no less than a couple of additional weeks, possibly more, to your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins if you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a selected deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably permit a little extra time – possibly a month in total – for production.
