In planning any calendar printing undertaking, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For the standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar isn’t ultimately person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they could already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the person’s arms close to the beginning of school if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you an excellent timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply have to be sure you enable sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it should most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they’ll want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, 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 complicated. How much time you want for gross sales is determined by your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or different event? In that case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember that you may be better off when you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you count on. Or possibly you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to allow at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must make sure to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have to add to the general duration of the calendar venture – you possibly can and should begin advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production phases of the challenge. However, in case you wait to begin advertising and marketing till you might have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow not less than a few further weeks, maybe extra, on your marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing venture starts whenever you hand off all of the pictures, text, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a selected deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability permit a bit of further time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
