Countdown 90 Days

In planning any calendar printing challenge, the obvious reality to concentrate to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, if your calendar is just not in the end consumer’s fingers earlier than January 1, 2014, they could have already got found an alternate. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar must be in the user’s hands near the beginning of faculty if it is going to be useful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a good timeline for your entire project.

How are you getting your calendars into the tip person’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it must be comparatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and decide by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or possibly you’re mailing them out to your customers or members; in that case you just must make sure you permit sufficient 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’s going to in all probability be cheaper and easier for you. Just ensure you discover out from the printer or mailhouse how much additional time they are going to want and factor it in.

If, on the other hand, you propose to print a calendar and sell it, either as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for gross sales is dependent upon your sales strategy. Are you promoting at an area pageant or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that offers you a deadline, however understand that you may be higher off when you can promote at a number of events, in case attendance or gross sales at one occasion aren’t what you count on. Or possibly you are having volunteers sell calendars to family and friends or door-to-door. In that case, you need to permit at the least two weeks, and ideally up to four weeks, since volunteers all have their own completely different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.

When you print a calendar that you plan to sell, it’s best to you’ll want to develop and implement a solid advertising plan. Advertising and marketing does not have to add to the general period of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and may start advertising through the planning and production phases of the challenge. Nevertheless, if you happen to wait to start marketing until you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you will need to permit no less than just a few extra weeks, perhaps extra, to your advertising and marketing message to achieve the supposed viewers and motivate them to buy.

The manufacturing section of a calendar printing mission starts while you hand off all of the images, text, logos, promoting, and so on. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork for you to approve and then places it on the press and delivers to you the finished product. Make sure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how long this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is normally about three weeks (typically sooner if you have a particular deadline). In case you anticipate last-minute adjustments or additions, or if you’ll be proofing by committee, then you should in all probability enable just a little further time – maybe a month in total – for production.