In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious reality 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 isn’t in the end person’s palms before January 1, 2014, they may have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s palms near the start of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the complete venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will have to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must be sure to permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’ll most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Simply be sure to discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and factor 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 little more difficult. How a lot time you need for gross sales will depend on your sales strategy. Are you selling at a local competition or other event? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however take into account that you may be higher off should you can sell at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event are usually not what you count on. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you should allow at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as four 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 simply plan to sell, you must make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall duration of the calendar mission – you may and may start marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. However, in case you wait to start marketing until you could have the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit at least a couple of additional weeks, perhaps more, on your advertising message to achieve the supposed viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production section of a calendar printing challenge starts when you hand off all the photos, text, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make 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 (typically sooner when you have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it’s best to most likely enable a bit further time – maybe a month in total – for production.
