In planning any calendar printing mission, the most obvious truth 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 will not be in the long run person’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s palms close to the beginning of college if it is going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you just must be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they will want and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you need for gross sales relies on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area pageant or other occasion? If so, then that gives you a deadline, but remember that you will be higher off if you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion should not what you anticipate. Or possibly you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, it’s best to allow at the very least two weeks, and ideally up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, it’s best to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar challenge – you can and may start advertising during the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. Nevertheless, in case you wait to start advertising till you have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow a minimum of a few extra weeks, perhaps more, for your marketing message to succeed in the meant viewers and encourage them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge starts while you hand off all of the photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a specific deadline). When you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you should most likely enable a bit of extra time – perhaps a month in whole – for manufacturing.
