In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious truth to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar is just not in the end user’s palms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s fingers near the start of school if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you a good timeline for the whole venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you might be mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must ensure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they will want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you want for gross sales is determined by your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you’ll be higher off in the event you can promote at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you need to enable at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you must remember to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar undertaking – you possibly can and may start advertising throughout the planning and production stages of the challenge. However, should you wait to start advertising until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will need to allow a minimum of just a few extra weeks, possibly more, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge starts once you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you’ve got a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably permit a little bit further time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
