In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be in the long run user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s palms close to the beginning of college if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or different occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be higher off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion will not be what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to permit at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it is best to be sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and should begin marketing during the planning and manufacturing phases of the project. Nevertheless, in the event you wait to start out marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit at the very least a couple of further weeks, maybe extra, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing mission starts whenever you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability enable a bit extra time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
