In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not ultimately user’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s hands near the beginning of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for all the venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to make sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they will need and factor it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area festival or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however remember the fact that you may be better off in the event you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must permit at least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you need to you should definitely develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you can and should start advertising through the planning and manufacturing phases of the venture. However, in case you wait to start marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at the least just a few additional weeks, maybe extra, to your advertising message to achieve the supposed audience and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts whenever you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to probably permit a bit additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
