In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t in the long run person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s fingers close to the start of college if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want 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 complicated. How much time you want for gross sales depends upon your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or other event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, however take into account that you may be higher off in case you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion will not be what you count on. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable not less than two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the overall period of the calendar mission – you can and should start marketing through the planning and production phases of the venture. Nevertheless, in case you wait to start out advertising till you have the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit at the least a few further weeks, maybe more, for your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing venture begins if you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which places 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 usually about three weeks (typically sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must most likely enable a little bit further time – maybe a month in total – for production.