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 a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s palms before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s hands close to the beginning of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a very good timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, 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 sophisticated. How a lot time you want for sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a local pageant or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you will be higher off for those who can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are usually not what you count on. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should enable a minimum of two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it is best to remember to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall length of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and should begin marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. Nonetheless, for those who wait to start out advertising until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit at the least a couple of further weeks, maybe extra, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing mission starts when you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. 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. Make sure you talk 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 you probably have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit just a little extra time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
