In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is just not in the end consumer’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s palms close to the beginning of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a superb timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’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 have to to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just need to ensure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they will want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a local competition or other occasion? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be higher off when you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you expect. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should allow not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you should you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar project – you possibly can and may start advertising in the course of the planning and production levels of the project. Nevertheless, if you wait to start out marketing until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit not less than just a few extra weeks, perhaps extra, for your advertising message to reach the supposed audience and motivate them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge starts if you hand off all the photos, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner if you have a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must probably allow slightly further time – maybe a month in total – for production.
