Quick guide to print strategy

The more effort you invest in the planning of your print publications, the easier the process will be in the long-term. This section can be used as a checklist for your first publication. If you keep this handy, and add to it over time, you’ll always be ready for the next step.

Below are some questions to guide you. For a one-time or first-try effort, you might spend a little time on these questions; whereas for an ongoing publication, this process becomes more important.

Start with this summary to see if you are ready to go further. You can then follow the links to get more detailed information to plan your full print strategy, or get started on something simple.

Some of the information relates to large scale print production, eg. newspapers and book editing. Just skip over the bits that don’t seem relevant (eg. detailed editing procedures).

Have your read our Message in-a-box Strategy Overview yet? Go there first and save your valuable time and resources. Make sure your print production fits with your overall communications strategy. Make sure you have chosen the right medium for your goals, audience, situation and messages.

Repeat this box in each media’s individual strategy section. Leave this in as a reminder to editors.

1. What are your goals?

Keep the project focused on a few, simple goals in order to reach out most effectively. These might be mainly about sending out political information, mobilising action in a short period of time, or focused on getting supporters into your work. Make a list of each goal and put them in order of priority. Remember that you do not have to reach all your goals in your first publication.

More about goal setting here. (Link to Strategy Overview – Goals).

Are you sure that a print or e-print publication is really what you need to achieve your strategic message goals?

Repeat this box in each media’s goal section. Leave this in as a reminder to editors.

2. Who is your audience?

Who are you trying to reach? Where are they? What are their lives like? Can they read? What will they read and what will they be looking for? How much time are they going to spend looking at it and what will keep their attention?

More about engaging and understanding your audience here. (Link to Strategy Overview – Audience).

3. What format will work best?

What kind of message/s do you want to communicate? The format should always link back to the goals and the audience.

If your messages will not date quickly and makes sense on their own, they can go into a smaller, one-off publication like a poster, sticker, t-shirt, booklet or pamphlet, perhaps linked to more frequent updates on your website.

Photo by Truthlying

If they are fast changing and related to several other developments, then a newsletter, zine or newspaper is best. One-off publications might also include a briefing paper or communiqué, but don’t suggest they will be one in a series unless you are committed to producing others.

Longer content might need to be turned into a report or even a book, or with a smaller budget perhaps an e-book for downloading. Anything online can be updated more regularly.

Find out more about print formats here. 

4. What will your final product look like? How will you distribute it?

Have a sense at the outset of the scale and shape of your finished publication. This might sound obvious, but projects can have a way of expanding drastically when enthusiasm grows. Don’t waste your energy on creating something unless you are clear about how to get it out in time. Early on, estimate the scope, size and number of copies you can effectively distribute. There are too many dead trees sitting around boxed up in corridors or being pulped already.

Find out more about printing and distribution here. 

5. What skills do you need to develop?

Ideas, a strategy and a team. These are the core human resources needed. Print production, especially for periodicals like newsletters and magazines, can be a wonderful team-building experience, but careful and patient co-ordination is required to make it a sustainable one. At the outset, take an inventory of the skills you need to bring out the publication.

Essential skills – to find or develop

• ideas
• strategy
• co-ordination / planning skills
• layout / design
• (grassroots) marketing & networking
• budgeting

Extra skills – for larger print jobs

• writing
• editing
• image sourcing, creation &/or manipulation
• desktop publishing / word processing

Find out more about finding and managing human resources, building teams and maintaining energy and focus in our Strategy Overview – Skills & Teams.

6. Resources you will need

Simple but effective
It is a myth that to produce a print production you require high-end computer resources. Newsletters, brochures, factsheets, posters, stickers and t-shirts, for example, can all be produced with computers. A good idea is often the central resource needed for a high-impact campaign. A series of fact sheets only needs a typewriter (or even clear handwriting) and access to a photocopier.

Sustaining publications
However, it is difficult to sustain ongoing complex print publishing without some computer resources. Below are the basics to get started on a “digital track.”

• Computer – To run the software listed in this section, you will need access to a personal computer with at least a 486DX 66 megahertz (MHz) processor and 128 megabytes (MB) of memory.
• Software – you can get straight into Open Office (a word processing tool) or Scribus (a layout tool) with the help of Message in-a-box, or work with anything else you or your team or community are confident using.
• Printer – Laser printers can be a very cost-effective way to do simple, print projects. Printers are also fairly essential at the editing and drafting stages on larger projects. See printing & distribution to help decide if you will be using a printer for the end result.
• Digital camera or scanner – A digital camera will create ready-to-use digital photos that you can download onto a computer. A scanner will allow you to digitise a printed image.
• Flash drive or memory stick – If you do not have your own computer, or if you will be using multiple computers, a USB-Flash drive, or a memory stick for smaller jobs, is an invaluable resource for moving files between computers.

7. Planning your production

There are four major stages of production:

• Content gathering
• Editing & manuscript preparation
• Layout & design
• Proof-reading.

Consider all the tasks you will have to complete during the production process, for example, selecting a theme, deciding on writers, getting articles ready, editing, proof-reading, and so on.

Find out more about production planning here.

8. Budgeting & Fundraising

As much as you can, make a rough budget to guide your work early on in the process. If you need to fund-raise to put your publication out, you will want to know before the final hour.

However, some of these questions will not be able to be answered until after you have done your content planning in detail. Therefore, you may need to do an initial draft of this section in the early phases, and come back to it to make a more detailed budget after you have begun the production process.

A good middle ground is to seek the advice of your colleagues or other organisations that have done similar print runs in the recent past, and use their numbers as a first draft budget.