In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the 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, if your calendar is not in the long run consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s palms near the start of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for the whole project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s arms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to ensure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they will need and factor it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for gross sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, however needless to say you may be higher off for those who can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion will not be what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to enable not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you need to be sure you develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general length of the calendar venture – you’ll be able to and should begin advertising and marketing through the planning and production phases of the mission. However, when you wait to start out advertising until you will have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the very least a couple of extra weeks, possibly more, to your marketing message to succeed in the intended viewers and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing challenge begins while you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (generally sooner in case you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must most likely enable a little bit further time – possibly a month in whole – for production.
