In planning any calendar printing challenge, the most 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 isn’t in the long run user’s arms before January 1, 2014, they may already have found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be in the consumer’s hands close to the beginning of faculty if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you an excellent timeline for the whole mission.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be comparatively 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 clients or members; in that case you just have to be sure to allow sufficient time for inserting into envelopes, adding a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it would most likely be cheaper and easier for you. Just be sure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they may want and issue it in.
If, then again, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a little more complicated. How a lot time you want for sales will depend on your gross sales strategy. Are you promoting at a neighborhood festival or different event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but understand that you’ll be higher off in the event you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or sales at one occasion will not be what you expect. Or possibly you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you should permit no less than two weeks, and preferably up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
Should you print a calendar that you just plan to promote, it’s best to remember to develop and implement a strong marketing plan. Marketing doesn’t have to add to the overall period of the calendar challenge – you’ll be able to and may begin marketing during the planning and manufacturing phases of the mission. Nevertheless, in case you wait to start advertising and marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to permit no less than a couple of additional weeks, possibly extra, in your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the supposed audience and motivate them to buy.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off all of the pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, and many others. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it’s usually about three weeks (typically sooner you probably have a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable a little extra time – possibly a month in complete – for production.
