In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact 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 will not be in the end consumer’s arms before 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 must be within the person’s arms close to the beginning of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for the entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must make sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they will need 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 a lot time you need for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or different event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however keep in mind that you may be higher off when you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event will not be what you anticipate. Or possibly you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow at least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and may start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the project. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start advertising and marketing until you will have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow no less than a couple of extra weeks, possibly extra, to your marketing message to succeed in the meant viewers and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing mission starts while you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to 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 lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (sometimes sooner when you’ve got a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable a little bit additional time – maybe a month in total – for manufacturing.
