In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar just isn’t in the long run user’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s hands near the start of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the complete mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either 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 dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local pageant or different event? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but understand that you will be better off when you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to allow no less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it is best to you should definitely develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and may start marketing during the planning and production stages of the challenge. Nevertheless, when you wait to start out marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at least a few further weeks, perhaps more, on your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing undertaking begins if you hand off all of the photographs, text, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a specific deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably permit a bit further time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
