In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that every 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 end person’s hands earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s palms near the beginning of college if it’s going to be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a very good timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to ensure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it will most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much extra time they will want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more difficult. How much time you need for gross sales is dependent upon your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood pageant or different occasion? If so, then that offers you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be higher off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion usually are not what you expect. Or perhaps you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, you need to enable at the least two weeks, and preferably as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you plan to sell, you must you’ll want to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you possibly can and should start advertising and marketing during the planning and production stages of the venture. Nonetheless, in the event you wait to begin advertising till you may have the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow no less than a few additional weeks, maybe extra, on your marketing message to achieve the intended audience and inspire them to buy.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing undertaking begins once you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Be sure to discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s normally about three weeks (sometimes sooner if you have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must in all probability allow a little additional time – maybe a month in total – for manufacturing.
