In planning any calendar printing mission, 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 in the end person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s fingers close to the beginning of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, 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 difficult. How much time you want for gross sales is determined by your sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you will be higher off if you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event should not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must allow no less than two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it is best to be sure you develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar undertaking – you may and may start advertising throughout the planning and production levels of the undertaking. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the least a couple of further weeks, maybe more, in your marketing message to reach the intended viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge begins if you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure 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 when you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability allow just a little further time – maybe a month in total – for production.
