In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious reality to pay attention 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 just isn’t in the end person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s hands close to the beginning of college if it will be useful 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 end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must make sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they may need 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 difficult. How much time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or different event? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be better off for those who can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t 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, you need to permit a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 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 sell, you must be sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the overall length of the calendar mission – you may and will begin marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the mission. However, should you wait to begin advertising till you will have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow no less than a few extra weeks, maybe extra, to your marketing message to succeed in the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture begins if you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, advertising, 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 completed product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably enable a bit of further time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
