In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious fact 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 ultimately person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers near the beginning of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for your complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend 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 need for gross sales depends on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or other occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you will be better off if you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are not what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to permit no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should be sure you develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar project – you may and may begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and production stages of the venture. Nonetheless, should you wait to start advertising and marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit a minimum of just a few additional weeks, possibly extra, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the meant audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project begins once you hand off all the images, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to discuss 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 you probably have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to probably allow a little additional time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
