In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is not in the long run user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s palms near the beginning of school if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the whole project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply need to be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, then again, you plan 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 much time you want for sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local competition or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you will be higher off should you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion aren’t what you count on. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must permit no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it’s best to make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and should start advertising throughout the planning and production stages of the mission. However, if you wait to start out advertising till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit not less than a number of extra weeks, perhaps extra, for your marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing undertaking begins while you hand off all the pictures, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must probably allow a little additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
