In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most obvious truth to concentrate 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 arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s fingers close to the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a very good timeline for the entire undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must make sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How a lot time you want for gross sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or different occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however keep in mind that you’ll be better off if you happen to can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion will not be what you count on. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to enable at least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
For those who print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you need to be sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar venture – you may and should start advertising and marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing phases of the project. Nonetheless, if you wait to start advertising until you might have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow no less than a few further weeks, perhaps more, in your marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and encourage them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing undertaking begins if you hand off all the photographs, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is often about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you need to in all probability permit somewhat additional time – perhaps a month in total – for manufacturing.
