In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious reality to concentrate 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 just isn’t ultimately person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s hands close to the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for the whole challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or other event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however understand that you’ll be higher off when you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should allow a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar undertaking – you can and should begin advertising and marketing during the planning and production levels of the project. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start out advertising till you could have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit no less than a number of extra weeks, possibly extra, to your marketing message to succeed in the meant viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge starts while you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must most likely permit just a little extra time – maybe a month in total – for production.
