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 shouldn’t be in the long run consumer’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the person’s hands close to the start of college if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must be sure to permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How a lot time you need for gross sales depends upon your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a local festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however understand that you’ll be better off should you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, it’s best to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar challenge – you’ll be able to and will begin marketing in the course of the planning and production levels of the project. However, if you happen to wait to start marketing until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the least a couple of additional weeks, maybe more, for your advertising message to succeed in the meant audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing mission begins once you hand off all the images, textual content, 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 lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely enable somewhat extra time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
