In planning any calendar printing project, the most 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 isn’t in the end person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s fingers near the beginning of school if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must be sure to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they will need and issue it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you need for sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you may be better off if you happen to can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to permit a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, it is best to be sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar project – you possibly can and should start advertising throughout the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. However, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the very least just a few extra weeks, maybe more, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge starts once you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable just a little further time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
