In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t in the end person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they may already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s fingers near the start of faculty if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for the whole challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may need and factor it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood competition or other occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however remember that you’ll be higher off in case you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion should not what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it is best to enable at least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should make sure to develop and implement a stable advertising and marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the overall length of the calendar undertaking – you can and will begin advertising and marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. However, for those who wait to start out marketing until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit not less than just a few extra weeks, possibly extra, on your marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and motivate them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing undertaking starts once you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, advertising, and so forth. 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. Be sure to speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability permit a little bit extra time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
