In planning any calendar printing venture, 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 will not be ultimately user’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers near the beginning of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a great timeline for the complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s fingers? 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’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or different occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but keep in mind that you may be higher off in the event you can sell at multiple events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to enable not less than two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to be sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and should begin advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the challenge. Nevertheless, if you wait to start advertising and marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at the least a few additional weeks, perhaps extra, on your advertising message to achieve the supposed audience and motivate them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge starts while you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a specific deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should most likely allow a bit extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.