In planning any calendar printing challenge, the 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 isn’t in the long run user’s palms 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 person’s arms close to the start of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you an excellent timeline for all the venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for sales relies on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be better off when you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to remember to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you can and will begin advertising and marketing through the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. Nevertheless, when you wait to start advertising till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow not less than just a few additional weeks, perhaps more, to your marketing message to reach the intended audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing project begins while you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. 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. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should most likely enable just a little extra time – maybe a month in total – for production.
