In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious truth 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 long run consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s fingers close to the beginning of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they will need 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 enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for gross sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or other occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, however understand that you may be better off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion should not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must permit at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you should make sure to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Marketing does not have to add to the overall length of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and will start advertising during the planning and production levels of the undertaking. However, should you wait to begin marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow a minimum of a couple of extra weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising message to reach the meant audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins whenever you hand off the entire pictures, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must probably allow a bit of extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.