In planning any calendar printing mission, the most 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 is just not in the end person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they could already have discovered an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline may be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the consumer’s fingers near the beginning of college if it will be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you timeline for all the challenge.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip user’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it needs to be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just have to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, adding a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or take into account having the printer or a local mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it is going to most likely be cheaper and simpler for you. Just be sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to want and factor it in.
If, however, you intend to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more sophisticated. How a lot time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you selling at a neighborhood pageant or different event? If so, then that provides you a deadline, however needless to say you’ll be higher off should you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one occasion are not what you expect. Or maybe you’re having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you need to enable not less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their own different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
When you print a calendar that you plan to promote, you should make sure to develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Advertising does not have so as to add to the overall length of the calendar project – you may and should start advertising and marketing during the planning and production levels of the venture. Nonetheless, should you wait to start out advertising until you’ve got the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit a minimum of a number of extra weeks, possibly more, in your advertising message to achieve the intended viewers and inspire them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing venture starts once you hand off all of the photos, textual content, logos, advertising, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar art work so that you can approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (sometimes sooner you probably have a particular deadline). For those who anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you may be proofing by committee, then you should probably allow just a little extra time – perhaps a month in total – for production.
