In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the long run user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the consumer’s arms near the beginning of faculty if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to be sure to enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area competition or different occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but needless to say you’ll be better off if you happen to can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow no less than two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you should make sure you develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you can and may start marketing during the planning and manufacturing levels of the venture. Nevertheless, in case you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you may have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit no less than a few extra weeks, possibly more, to your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture starts while you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to probably enable just a little additional time – perhaps a month in whole – for production.