In planning any calendar printing project, the most obvious fact to concentrate to is that each calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar will not be in the end person’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might already have found an alternative. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the user’s hands near the beginning of faculty if it’ll be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for the entire venture.
How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s palms? Are you giving them away? If that’s the case, then it must be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you’ll need to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you are mailing them out to your prospects or members; in that case you just must ensure you permit enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or consider having the printer or a neighborhood mailhouse deal with mailing the calendars – it’ll in all probability be cheaper and simpler for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot further time they are going to need and factor it in.
If, alternatively, 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 complicated. How much time you need for sales relies on your sales strategy. Are you promoting at a local festival or other event? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, but remember that you’ll be better off for those who can promote at multiple occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion are not what you expect. Or maybe you are having volunteers promote calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. If that’s the case, you must enable at the very least two weeks, and preferably as much as 4 weeks, since volunteers all have their very own different schedules, and some will want reminders and encouragement.
If you print a calendar that you just plan to sell, it is best to be sure you develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the overall period of the calendar challenge – you possibly can and will start marketing in the course of the planning and production phases of the project. Nevertheless, if you wait to start advertising until you could have the calendars in hand, then you will have to allow no less than a couple of extra weeks, maybe more, to your advertising and marketing message to achieve the intended viewers and inspire them to buy.
The production part of a calendar printing venture starts whenever you hand off all of the images, textual content, logos, advertising, etc. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar paintings for you to approve after which places it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Make sure you discuss to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (generally sooner when you have a specific deadline). If you happen to anticipate last-minute changes or additions, or if you will be proofing by committee, then it is best to in all probability permit a bit extra time – maybe a month in whole – for production.
