In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious reality 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 isn’t ultimately person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s palms near the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for your entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to make sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they may want and issue it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local pageant or other event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but understand that you will be higher off when you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion will not be what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you should allow at least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you should you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general period of the calendar undertaking – you may and will begin marketing in the course of the planning and production stages of the challenge. However, if you happen to wait to begin marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at the very least just a few additional weeks, possibly extra, on your advertising and marketing message to reach the supposed audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing undertaking begins if you hand off the entire images, text, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you talk 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 you probably have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability enable a little extra time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
