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 a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not in the long run consumer’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s fingers near the beginning of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will want and issue it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be better off in case you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should permit at the least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to you’ll want to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising does not have to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you can and should begin advertising and marketing through the planning and production phases of the challenge. Nonetheless, should you wait to start advertising and marketing till you will have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow a minimum of a couple of extra weeks, maybe more, in your advertising message to succeed in the meant viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge starts whenever you hand off all of the images, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then 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’s normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a selected deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability enable a bit of further time – maybe a month in total – for manufacturing.
