In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s hands near the beginning of school if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, then again, 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 need for sales relies on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or other event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however keep in mind that you’ll be higher off in case you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you must allow at the least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should be sure you develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and should begin advertising and marketing during the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start out marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at least a couple of further weeks, maybe more, to your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off all of the images, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a specific deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should most likely enable somewhat additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
