In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is just not ultimately person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s palms near the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must ensure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, then again, 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 sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area festival or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you will be higher off in case you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow not less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must remember to develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and will start advertising and marketing during the planning and production stages of the project. Nevertheless, in case you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at least a few further weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project begins while you hand off all of the images, textual content, 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. Make sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably allow a little bit further time – possibly a month in total – for production.
