In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar just isn’t ultimately user’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the person’s arms close to the start of college if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for the entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should 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 prospects or members; in that case you just must be sure to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure 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, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more complicated. How much time you need for gross sales depends on your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, however remember that you’ll be better off in case you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you count on. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to enable no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you plan to sell, it’s best to remember to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar undertaking – you can and will begin advertising in the course of the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. Nevertheless, in case you wait to start advertising and marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit no less than a few extra weeks, perhaps extra, on your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The production section of a calendar printing challenge starts when you hand off all the images, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner in case you have a selected deadline). If you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability allow a little extra time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
