In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar shouldn’t be ultimately person’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s hands near the beginning of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for the 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 ought to be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to ensure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local festival or different event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you may be better off if you happen to can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are usually not what you count on. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it’s best to permit a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it’s best to remember to develop and implement a solid marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you possibly can and should begin marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the project. However, in case you wait to start marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you have to to permit at the least a few extra weeks, possibly extra, to your marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing project begins when you hand off all of 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. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a particular deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely allow a little extra time – maybe a month in complete – for production.
