In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious fact 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 isn’t ultimately consumer’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s fingers near the start of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to make sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for sales is dependent upon your sales technique. Are you selling at a local competition or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however understand that you will be higher off in case you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event usually are not what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you must enable at least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to remember to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar undertaking – you may and will start advertising through the planning and production stages of the venture. Nonetheless, for those who wait to begin marketing until you have got the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow a minimum of a number of further weeks, maybe more, in your advertising and marketing message to reach the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing project begins if you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should most likely enable somewhat further time – possibly a month in whole – for manufacturing.
