In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious reality 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 shouldn’t be ultimately consumer’s arms before January 1, 2014, they could have already got discovered an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the user’s fingers near the start of college if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline may give you timeline for all the venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the top person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to determine the distribution logistics and determine 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 have to be sure you permit sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a local mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it’s going to most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure to find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How much time you need for sales depends on your gross sales technique. Are you promoting at a local festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember that you will be higher off if you can promote at multiple events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you expect. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, you need to enable at the least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to promote, you must be sure to develop and implement a stable marketing plan. Advertising and marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the overall duration of the calendar undertaking – you’ll be able to and will start marketing during the planning and manufacturing stages of the project. However, for those who wait to start out advertising until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow at the very least a couple of further weeks, possibly more, in your advertising message to reach the intended viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing undertaking starts when you hand off all the pictures, text, logos, promoting, and so forth. 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 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 often about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a specific deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably allow somewhat extra time – perhaps a month in complete – for manufacturing.
