In planning any calendar printing project, the obvious truth to pay attention to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar shouldn’t be in the end user’s palms earlier than January 1, 2014, they might have already got found another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be within the person’s palms close to the beginning of school if it will be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for your complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the end consumer’s hands? Are you giving them away? If so, then it ought to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or perhaps you are mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you simply must be sure to enable enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or contemplate having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it can in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Simply ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot extra time they’ll need and factor it in.
If, however, you plan to print a calendar and sell it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making venture, then distribution is a little more sophisticated. How a lot time you need for gross sales will depend on your gross sales technique. Are you selling at an area competition or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that gives you a deadline, but keep in mind that you will be higher off should you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event aren’t what you count on. Or maybe you’re having volunteers promote calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you need to allow no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and some will need reminders and encouragement.
In case you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should be sure you develop and implement a strong advertising plan. Marketing does not have so as to add to the general period of the calendar challenge – you’ll be able to and may start advertising and marketing throughout the planning and production stages of the venture. Nonetheless, if you wait to start marketing until you have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow at the very least a number of further weeks, maybe extra, in your marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and encourage them to purchase.
The production phase of a calendar printing challenge begins once you hand off the entire pictures, textual content, logos, promoting, 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. Be sure to discuss 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 you probably have a selected deadline). When you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it’s best to probably permit a little bit additional time – possibly a month in total – for production.
