In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end person’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s palms near the beginning of college if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for your complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’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 decide by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they will want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you need for gross sales depends upon your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood festival or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be higher off if you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event should not what you anticipate. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you need to allow at the least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to you should definitely develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar venture – you can and should begin advertising in the course of the planning and production phases of the mission. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to start advertising and marketing until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit no less than just a few further weeks, maybe more, on your marketing message to succeed in the supposed viewers and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing project begins while you hand off the entire photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should probably enable slightly extra time – possibly a month in total – for production.
