In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious reality 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 is not in the end person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s palms close to the beginning of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend 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 need for gross sales depends upon your sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or other occasion? If so, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you may be better off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you count on. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should be sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar venture – you may and may begin advertising through the planning and manufacturing phases of the undertaking. However, in the event you wait to begin advertising and marketing until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit no less than a few further weeks, maybe more, on your marketing message to succeed in the meant audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing project begins while you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you discuss 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 when you’ve got a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability allow a bit further time – possibly a month in total – for production.
