In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar will not be in the end user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might already have discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s palms close to the start of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for the entire challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply must be sure you enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Simply make sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they may need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How much time you need for gross sales relies on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at an area pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but needless to say you may be higher off in case you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you should enable no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, you must you should definitely develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall length of the calendar undertaking – you may and may begin advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the project. Nevertheless, for those who wait to begin advertising until you have got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at least a few extra weeks, maybe more, in your advertising and marketing message to reach the meant audience and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing section of a calendar printing venture starts once you hand off all of the photographs, textual content, logos, promoting, and so forth. 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 completed product. Be sure you talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (typically sooner if in case you have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you must probably permit somewhat additional time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
