In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar just isn’t ultimately user’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s fingers close to the beginning of faculty if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for the entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just have to be sure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you propose 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 a lot time you need for gross sales depends upon your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however keep in mind that you will be better off when you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you must enable at the least two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, it is best to make sure you develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar challenge – you may and will start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the challenge. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to begin advertising until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit no less than a number of additional weeks, perhaps extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing project starts once you hand off all the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to 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 selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable slightly extra time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.
