In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be in the long run person’s hands 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 must be in the person’s arms near the start of school if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just have to be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they will want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however understand that you may be better off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must allow no less than 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.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you should make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar project – you can and will begin marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. Nonetheless, should you wait to start out marketing until you have got the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow not less than a couple of extra weeks, possibly extra, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing mission begins once you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, promoting, etc. 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 completed product. Be sure you talk 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 if in case you have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to most likely allow slightly extra time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
