Select a format

Now that you are clear on your goals, you are ready to select a format. Brochure, newsletter, magazine, book, poster, t-shirt, sticker… any or all of these might be needed to make sure you are heard.

How to decide? Think about your goals, capacity and audience. Are you trying to get fast action on an issue, directing people to your website for more details? Maybe stickers put up by volunteers or fliers handed out at demonstrations and posters are needed.

Want to engage people over the longer term, by giving them an in-depth understanding of the voices and issues involved in your cause? Is it information that changes all the time? Generally a combination of channels is required to reach all goals and audiences in the short and long term.

Get clear about the right medium and format for your goals, audience, situation and messages. Read our Message in-a-box Strategy Overview.

Message in-a-box gives you guidance for developing advanced print projects, like magazines, that might require fairly complex writing and editing. But if you are just doing a simple poster or flier, you won’t need to read the indepth editing section for example. Just read as much as you need (but don’t skip over the Strategy Overview.)

Don’t forget your calls to action and contact details (including a link to your website). Even simple projects like fliers will be helped by reading the Style, Design & Layout section.

Budgeting & fundraising

Once you have a quick idea of cost by asking around, you might need to go into more depth for larger projects requiring ongoing funding, such as publications (magazine, newsletter, series of fact sheets).

Direct Costs

How much will it cost to print? Look at:

• Format – size and shape, number of pages, paper type, colours, binding, covers (if any).
• Print run – how many copies will you print?
• Distribution – a big question, often overlooked. What method will you use? How much will it cost?
• One-off costs – eg. computer equipment, design of template.

Other Costs

Human resources – What percentage of staff time will be spent on the project? How will this be accounted for? Will any contributors need to be paid (eg. graphic designer, illustrators, cartoonists)?

Travel, expenses, other – Will there be any other costs you need to consider in advance?

Seeking Funds

Publications can serve as fund-raising tools. Space can be set aside for ads from supporters, even your printer. You can ask individuals to donate.

Cutting Costs

• Don’t print, do an e-book instead (but only if it reaches your audience).
• Use more affordable paper.
• Stick to black & white or one-colour printing; replace colour photos with grayscale, or with simple graphics.
• Get other quotes for paper or printing.
• Reduce the frequency.
• Reduce the weight (paper and mail costs) or number for distribution.
• Reduce the size by cutting articles / pages or even reducing fonts (careful to maintain good layout and readability).

Advertising

Small-scale ads are a great way to fund publications and also provide a needed service to the small businesses in your community. Make sure you set an ad-rate sheet and stick to it. One thing people often forget is that maintaining an ad business takes time and labour. When you make a sale, you will have to co-ordinate with the business to get a copy of the graphic they want included and then you will have to bring them a copy of the paper when it is done to show that the ad has run. Do not take on doing layout for advertisers unless they pay you for this service.

More on Budgeting & Fundraising in the Strategy Overview. (internal link to B&F target)

Plan your production

There are four major stages of production. These still apply (in a much simpler version) even if you are doing a simple project like a brochure.

1. Content Gathering
2. Editing & Manuscript Preparation
3. Layout & Design
4. Proof-reading.

Production Calender

Even a simple publishing effort will benefit from a basic timeline and task assignment list. This will make the difference between a chaotic experience and a pleasant one.

Consider all the tasks you will have to complete during the production process. Group them if you can into logical headings. Here is a basic outline of the production process for a newsletter or magazine. There are many sub-tasks you could also add.

1.Planning
Budgeting & fund-raising
Content Mapping

2.Production
Content gathering
Editing & formatting

3.Layout & Design
Proof-reading

4.Printing

5.Distribution

6.Evaluation

Allocate a clear task owner for each task in the task list. You might want to assign a backup owner in case of emergency on more important or large tasks.

Deadlines & Time Management

To fill in deadlines, pick your final deadline and work backwards from that date to ensure that each task on the task list is completed on time. Build in a safety buffer to allow for unexpected delays. The greatest buffer time should be allocated for sourcing content.

Writers need to be reminded of their deadlines and pushed for content but not so hard as to lose good will. Raise a red flag as soon as a deadline seems in danger of being missed and look for ways to pull up the schedule.

Don’t forget to leave plenty of time for proof-reading before you print the final version, if you can’t afford to get a professional proof-reader to go over the whole text, at least ask someone who has good language skills and hasn’t looked at the publication yet to go through the final version for you.

Editorial policy

A clear set of editorial guidelines will help everyone stay focussed, on time, on task and on message. It also promotes transparency and accountability within your community, and will help handle controversial submissions. Your policy should outline:

Format - ie. what language or dialect, what style if appropriate, and what types of pieces, for example news items.

Exclusions & Style – eg. what content if any is deemed to be unacceptable, such as politically offensive speech,
gender-biased language.

Editing - What rights you reserve regarding editing. Make sure people have clear expectations to avoid losing a key contributor. Most publications will reserve the right to edit all submissions for length and clarity.

Acknowledgement – Will you give by-lines to writers? Some collectives have a political position against doing so (eg. Saheli Women’s Resource Centre) but others deem it necessary. It is always good to encourage people by giving credit, but what are the implications of that?

Writers Guidelines - If you publish frequently and rely on submissions, consider offering a broader document with updated information about the focus of your current publishing efforts, sometimes called “Writers Guidelines”.

See Carbusters website for an example of how one campaigning organisation accepts material.

Style Guide - Larger, ongoing productions, especially when there are a number of people working on them, might justify having a Style Guide. This needs to be included in Writer’s Guidelines also.

Editorial policy

A clear set of editorial guidelines will help everyone stay focussed, on time, on task and on message. It also promotes transparency and accountability within your community, and will help handle controversial submissions. Your policy should outline:

Format - ie. what language or dialect, what style if appropriate, and what types of pieces, for example news items.

Exclusions & Style – eg. what content if any is deemed to be unacceptable, such as politically offensive speech,
gender-biased language.

Editing - What rights you reserve regarding editing. Make sure people have clear expectations to avoid losing a key contributor. Most publications will reserve the right to edit all submissions for length and clarity.

Acknowledgement – Will you give by-lines to writers? Some collectives have a political position against doing so (eg. Saheli Women’s Resource Centre) but others deem it necessary. It is always good to encourage people by giving credit, but what are the implications of that?

Writers Guidelines - If you publish frequently and rely on submissions, consider offering a broader document with updated information about the focus of your current publishing efforts, sometimes called “Writers Guidelines”.

See the Carbusters website for an example of how one campaigning organisation accepts material.

Style Guide - Larger, ongoing productions, especially when there are a number of people working on them, might justify having a Style Guide. This needs to be included in Writer’s Guidelines also.

Gather your content

Note: This content is mainly relevant people working on advanced print publications such as magazines. Skim read only if you are working on a simpler projectsuch as a poster.

There are two basic ways to generate content: solicit it from others, or write it from within your production team – usually a bit of both.

Gathering quality and relevant content from the grassroots is one of the most important and difficult jobs, and often the most neglected. Rather than speaking on behalf of people, community media should allow people to speak for themselves whenever possible. It is also good to include “expert” contributions to frame and clarify issues. Your own editorial team can also contribute.

To gather contributions and avoid writing it all yourselves, you will need to:

• have a plan with clear deadlines and responsibilities
• develop and sometimes train contacts who have an ear to the ground and can write, or are willing to learn
• provide a clear brief including length and purpose and useful editorial guidelines
• be clear about, and follow-up on, deadlines in time
• manage a respectful and skillful editing process.

Don’t miss the story

Always take a digital camera with you to actions and events. Make sure that you are recording and filing minutes of meetings, reports of trips and delegations, self-evaluations of actions, summaries of research projects.

Be on the look-out for material that communicates the core of your work. If you are doing this regularly, it will be easy to fill your publication with relevant and timely material. Build documentation into the day-to-day culture of your organisation.

You can also explore the habit of audio documentation, which can later be transcribed.

Your community must be encouraged to suggest stories to you (and even write them or provide good draft material), but you can ask for what you want to – calling out for coverage of important issues and events. Brainstorming sessions will bring out ideas for the type of stories and items that will be relevant to your goals and audience. Make sure you have a balance of “soft” and “hard”, factual and opinion, human experience and statistics as relevant.

Map your content

Regardless of who will be contributing, always start the process with a brainstorm session - working toward a “map” of the content you want to include. Note each article and graphic component separately, and include who is assigned to write it, recruit it (if relevant), and edit it – and what their deadlines are. It is best to do this in some sort of spreadsheet format that can be updated as you go.

It is important to establish a tradition of content mapping early in your production cycle, especially if you are producing a newsletter with multiple sections. Even a one-off poster or brochure will benefit from a scaled-down version of this process. Content mapping will help you to task master and also know how each component fits into your overall goal. Makes notes for:

• Each article or image name
• Who will do the writing/reporting
• Who will liaise with others for external contributions
• Who will edit
• Deadlines for each item

If the article or photograph falls into a content cluster in this issue, or is part of an ongoing section or column, note this also. As you go, other options or angles may emerge for grouping your content thematically, and your content map can help you identify these themes and work with them early on.

Right, now you have a strategy, a format, a process for bringing in good material and a production plan – let’s look at how we start to put it all together.

Style, layout & design

Simple Guide

Create a layout of your publication (section-by-section, page-by-page), poster or other project. This allows you to decide what goes where and how it will flow for the eye and mind of the reader. Also, how it will be physically printed, cut and, if appropriate, assembled.

You can use Inkscape to design simple graphics or logos for your publication. If you do not have a talent for graphic design or access to a designer, it is best to stick to templates like the ones in Scribus. Read the guide to laying out an information leaflet for more on this. You can even use Open Office for very simple layout.

For all projects

• Sketch it out on blank or grid paper before moving onto computer.
• Consider how you can use images
• Can you afford colour (eg. in images, pre-printed header sheets or other design elements.)
• Think about the use of white space – an essential design element.
• How will the eye move across the design?

For publications 

• Allow single pages for the front and back cover, and planning what will go on facing pages.
• Remember they are laid in multiples of one, two or four because of the way that the printing and folding processes work.

Manual design (with no computers)

Simple projects like fact sheets, stickers, t-shirts and posters can be achieved without a computer by handwriting or typing information, or handing an image and text to your printer. Even a brochure could be done in this way.

Style Guide

If your organisation is going to publish frequently, it is important to evolve a consistent communication style. A style guide is a document that details specific decisions which have been made as to what protocols to use. “Style” refers to anything from whether to use full stops in acronyms; whether to write “nonprofit” or “non-profit,” or whether to capitalise “Global South” or not.

The best approach is to start with something simple (perhaps copied from another organization you respect) and develop it as you go. Make decisions as a group, and then document these. Be aware of cultural conventions based on the areas you are publishing in.