In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious truth to concentrate 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 is just not ultimately person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s hands close to the beginning of faculty if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you want for sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or different occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but needless to say you may be better off when you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should enable at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you may and may begin advertising through the planning and production stages of the mission. However, in case you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you will have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit no less than a few extra weeks, possibly more, for your marketing message to achieve the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge starts once you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. 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 finished product. Ensure you talk 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 if in case you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably enable a bit of additional time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
