In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is not ultimately consumer’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s arms close to the start of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the whole venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s palms? 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’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must make sure you allow enough 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 can in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you want for sales relies on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a local competition or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but keep in mind that you may be higher off if you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event will not be what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you should enable no less than two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to promote, you need to you’ll want to develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar challenge – you’ll be able to and may start advertising during the planning and production stages of the undertaking. Nonetheless, in the event you wait to start out advertising till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit no less than a few extra weeks, perhaps more, to your marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing project begins if you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability permit slightly further time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
