In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is just not in the long run person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s palms near the beginning of school if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more difficult. How a lot time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your sales technique. Are you selling at a local pageant or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be higher off should 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 friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you must allow not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, it is best to you should definitely develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar undertaking – you may and will start advertising and marketing through the planning and production stages of the project. However, should you wait to start out marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the least a number of extra weeks, perhaps extra, in your marketing message to succeed in the meant audience and encourage them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing mission starts when you hand off all of the photos, text, logos, advertising, 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 completed product. Make sure you 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 you probably have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to probably allow slightly additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
