In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is just not in the end person’s arms 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 within the consumer’s arms close to the beginning of faculty if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a superb timeline for your complete project.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your clients 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 contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they will want and issue it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for sales relies on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, however keep in mind that you’ll be higher off should you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you anticipate. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to enable at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to make sure you develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you possibly can and may begin advertising during the planning and production stages of the mission. However, in case you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you have got the calendars in hand, then you will have to permit not less than a couple of additional weeks, perhaps extra, on your advertising message to succeed in the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing part of a calendar printing undertaking begins whenever you hand off all the photographs, text, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts 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 (sometimes sooner when you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely allow slightly additional time – maybe a month in total – for production.
