In planning any calendar printing project, the 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 just isn’t ultimately user’s hands before January 1, 2014, they might already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s hands near the start of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the end user’s palms? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you will need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must be sure you allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it will in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they may need and issue it in.
If, alternatively, you intend to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales is determined by your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or other occasion? In that case, then that offers you a deadline, however remember the fact that you may be better off in the event you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion should not what you anticipate. Or maybe you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If so, it’s best to permit a minimum of two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own completely different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you must you should definitely develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Advertising doesn’t have so as to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you can and will begin marketing throughout the planning and manufacturing phases of the challenge. Nonetheless, in case you wait to start advertising and marketing till you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you have to to allow a minimum of a couple of extra weeks, possibly more, for your marketing message to achieve the supposed audience and encourage them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing challenge starts once you hand off all the photographs, text, logos, advertising, and so on. 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 finished product. Ensure you speak 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 if in case you have a specific deadline). Should you anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then you need to probably allow a bit of extra time – possibly a month in complete – for manufacturing.
