In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be in the long run user’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s fingers close to the beginning of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just need to be sure to allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would probably be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they are going to need and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a local pageant or other event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, however take into account that you may be better off for those who can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event should not what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you should enable at the least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you should be sure to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar undertaking – you may and will begin advertising in the course of the planning and production phases of the undertaking. Nonetheless, in the event you wait to start marketing till you could have the calendars in hand, then you will want to allow at least just a few extra weeks, possibly more, in your marketing message to reach the supposed viewers and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts if you hand off all the images, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you need to probably permit a bit further time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
