In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t in the long run consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the user’s hands close to the start of school if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it should be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you will be higher off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you expect. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to allow a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and should start advertising through the planning and production levels of the challenge. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to begin marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow not less than a few additional weeks, possibly extra, for your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture starts if you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you have a specific deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability allow just a little extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.
