In planning any calendar printing venture, the most obvious fact to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar isn’t in the long run user’s arms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s palms near the start of school if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a good timeline for the entire mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the end person’s hands? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you will want to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you might be mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must be sure to permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want and issue it in.
If, however, 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 want for sales depends on your sales technique. Are you promoting at a neighborhood competition or different event? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but remember the fact that you will be better off in case you can sell at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one event will not be what you count on. Or maybe you might be having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, it is best to permit at the very least two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, you need to make sure to develop and implement a solid advertising and marketing plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar undertaking – you can and may start marketing during the planning and production levels of the project. Nonetheless, if you happen to wait to begin advertising and marketing until you’ve the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow not less than a couple of additional weeks, possibly more, on your marketing message to succeed in the meant viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing undertaking begins once you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, advertising, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work for you to approve and then puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s often about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a selected deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you must probably permit a little extra time – possibly a month in total – for production.
