In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run user’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternate. 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 college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for your entire 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 decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you want for gross sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a local competition or different occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, however take into account that you will be better off when you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you count on. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to allow no less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to be sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar venture – you can and may begin marketing in the course of the planning and production stages of the project. Nonetheless, if you wait to begin advertising until you have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at least a number of extra weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed viewers and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing venture starts whenever you hand off the entire images, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably allow somewhat additional time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
