In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t ultimately consumer’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s hands close to the start of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you timeline for the whole project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area festival or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however remember the fact that you may be better off should you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to enable at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should remember to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and should begin marketing in the course of the planning and production stages of the project. Nonetheless, when you wait to start out marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit at the least just a few additional weeks, perhaps more, for your advertising message to achieve the supposed audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing mission begins if you hand off all the images, text, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should probably permit a little additional time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
