In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious fact to concentrate to is that every 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 end consumer’s fingers 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 in the user’s arms near the start of school if it’s going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can provide you a superb timeline for the complete undertaking.
How are you getting your calendars into the top user’s arms? Are you giving them away? In that case, then it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you simply need to make sure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a cover letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’s going to probably be cheaper and easier for you. Simply ensure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how much further time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, then again, you plan to print a calendar and promote it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more difficult. How much time you need for sales relies on your gross sales strategy. Are you selling at an area pageant or different event? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but understand that you will be better off in case you can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or sales at one event will not be what you expect. Or perhaps you are having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. In that case, you need to permit a minimum of two weeks, and preferably up to 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will need reminders and encouragement.
If you happen to print a calendar that you plan to promote, you must be sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing doesn’t have so as to add to the general duration of the calendar project – you may and should begin advertising during the planning and production phases of the mission. Nonetheless, should you wait to start out advertising till you have the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow not less than just a few additional weeks, maybe more, on your advertising and marketing message to succeed in the intended audience and inspire them to purchase.
The manufacturing phase of a calendar printing challenge starts while you hand off the entire photos, text, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Be sure to talk to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner you probably have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should most likely permit a bit of extra time – possibly a month in total – for production.
