In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar just isn’t ultimately person’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers close to the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you want for sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different occasion? In that case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you may be better off if you happen to can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must enable a minimum of two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should make sure you develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall length of the calendar mission – you possibly can and may begin marketing during the planning and production stages of the venture. However, when you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow at the very least a number of additional weeks, perhaps extra, in your advertising message to achieve the intended viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge starts while you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable somewhat extra time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
