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 the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be in the end consumer’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s hands near the beginning of college if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just have to ensure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales depends on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember that you will be better off if you happen to can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are not what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to allow at least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you must you should definitely develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar undertaking – you may and should start advertising and marketing through the planning and production phases of the challenge. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to begin marketing until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit at the very least a number of additional weeks, possibly more, for your marketing message to reach the supposed audience and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge starts while you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must most likely enable a little additional time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
