In planning any calendar printing project, the 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 is just not ultimately person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s arms close to the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’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 need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you want for sales relies on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or other occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but remember that you may be higher off if you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are not what you count on. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to enable at the least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it is best to make sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and will start marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the venture. However, if you wait to begin marketing till you have the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit no less than just a few extra weeks, perhaps more, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing mission starts once you hand off all of the photos, text, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you speak 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 in case you have a selected 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 enable a bit additional time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
