In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end consumer’s hands 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 must be in the user’s hands close to the start of faculty if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply have to be sure to enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or an area mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they’ll want and factor it in.
If, then again, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for sales depends on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at a local festival or different occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be higher off in case you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event are not what you anticipate. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to enable no less than two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it is best to make sure you develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the general length of the calendar challenge – you may and should start advertising and marketing during the planning and manufacturing phases of the project. Nevertheless, should you wait to start out marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will want to permit no less than a few further weeks, possibly more, for your advertising and marketing message to reach the intended audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing mission begins once you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Ensure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to in all probability enable a bit of further time – perhaps a month in complete – for production.
