In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the end person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s hands close to the beginning of faculty if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the complete challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may want and issue it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a local pageant or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be better off in the event you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you should enable no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to make sure to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and may begin marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the challenge. However, for those who wait to start out marketing until you will have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow at least a few extra weeks, possibly more, on your marketing message to reach the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing venture begins once you hand off the entire images, text, logos, advertising, and many others. 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. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a specific deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable a little bit additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
