In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately person’s hands before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s hands close to the start of faculty if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for the whole undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you permit enough 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 will probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales depends upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local competition or different occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but needless to say you may be better off in the event you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are not what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to permit a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to be sure to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar undertaking – you may and should start advertising and marketing during the planning and production levels of the undertaking. Nonetheless, for those who wait to begin advertising and marketing till you’ve the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit no less than a few further weeks, perhaps extra, in your advertising message to reach the intended audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing venture begins if you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to probably allow a bit of further time – maybe a month in total – for production.
