In planning any calendar printing venture, the obvious reality to pay attention 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 isn’t in the end user’s fingers 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 needs to be in the user’s arms near the start of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the whole project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just have to be sure to permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for sales is dependent upon your sales technique. Are you promoting at a local competition or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you’ll be higher off if you happen to can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event usually are not what you anticipate. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to permit not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to be sure you develop and implement a strong advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and will start marketing through the planning and production stages of the undertaking. However, when you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the least just a few extra weeks, maybe more, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts whenever you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner you probably have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability enable a bit extra time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
