In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious reality to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar just isn’t ultimately consumer’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they may have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers near the beginning of faculty if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for your entire project.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine 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 must be sure to enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will need and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either 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 depends upon your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but needless to say you will be better off if you happen to can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must permit at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you must be sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar venture – you can and may begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and production stages of the venture. Nevertheless, for those who wait to start marketing until you have got the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit at the least a couple of extra weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the meant audience and motivate them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing challenge begins while you hand off the entire images, textual content, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (typically sooner in case you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely enable just a little additional time – maybe a month in whole – for manufacturing.
