In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious fact to pay attention 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 just isn’t in the end user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s palms close to the start of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the whole project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must ensure you enable enough 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 should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they may want and issue it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area festival or different event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but keep in mind that you may be better off should you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event will not be what you anticipate. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable not less than two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you plan to promote, it is best to be sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general period of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and should begin marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the undertaking. However, for those who wait to begin advertising until you might have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow no less than a couple of additional weeks, possibly more, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the meant viewers and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing mission starts if you hand off the entire photographs, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you must probably enable a bit of extra time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
