In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious reality to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers near the start of school if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for all the undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you may be better off if you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it is best to enable at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should make sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general length of the calendar venture – you can and may begin marketing through the planning and production levels of the venture. Nonetheless, should you wait to start advertising and marketing until you have got the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow not less than a number of additional weeks, perhaps extra, on your advertising message to achieve the meant audience and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off all the photographs, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability enable a bit of extra time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
